Closer to home (and 2015), architect Frank Gehry recently captivated audiences in his Walt Disney Hall with a crumbled paper design for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Seattle Opera will stage an ultra-modern production of Handel’s Semele in February with multimedia-infused set design by the brilliant Erhard Rom. Even Pablo Picasso had a foray into set design, with his cubist-inspired set for Massine’s ballet Le Tricorne. It is not surprising, then, that the respective genres of ballet and opera have explored these concepts as well, most notably through set design, constantly inventing visually striking ways to depict their milieux.Ī list of the world’s most famous artists have lent their talents to set design, including Dali’s surrealist Salome, Nolan’s aboriginal Australian Rite of Spring, and Hockney’s neoclassical Rake’s Progress, the latter widely considered a benchmark staging of the opera. The same could be said for the classical arts post nineteenth-century, where truer depictions of reality have made way for expressionist proportions, post-modern deconstructions, geometric re-imaginings, ironic metaphysical interpretations and other ‘innovative’ presentations of familiar material. Innovation has become de rigueur in our modern society, with updates, expansion packs and new models introduced on an almost-daily basis.

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