Schinkel as Scenographer and 'Staging' the World : Focusing his Stage Designs for Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute)

Abstract

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the pre-eminent architect of 19th-century Prussia, also worked in other areas, for example, landscape painting, diorama (then fashionable) and city planning (Berlin) . Returning from the Grand Tour, Schinkel began to work with the Gropius company, scenic designers, on panoramas and dioramas. Using new optical techniques, he tried to recapture his sublimely dislocating experience in the Italian landscape, that had altered his very sense of his own body. He thought he could apply these techniques directly to theatrical set design, which, through pictorial near-illusion, would transport the spectators into the imaginary quasi-reality of the drama. Schinkel's outstanding stage designs for The Magic Flute are the pinnacle of his accomplishment as a scenographer. As superintendent of the Berlin city planning department, he extended his theatrical conceptions to the wider spheres of architecture and urban design. In conceiving the Berlin cityscape as a stage setting, he was a precursor of the politics of spectacle.