Spectacular brilliance
Photographer Candida Höfer focuses on opera houses from Capri to Düsseldorf, highlighting their ingenious architecture. At Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf.
Candida Höfer likes to train her absolute eye for the perfection and clarity of spaces on the magnificent architecture of opera houses, theaters, and palaces. The better the architecture, the more exciting her images—images in which nothing is altered, manipulated, sampled, or chromatically distorted. This is currently evident in a series of theater interiors on view at Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf.
She has titled the exhibition “Opera! Opera!”, presenting historic audience chambers of opera houses as they emerged in the first half of the 17th century and continued to develop through Classicism into the present day. Emblematic of this evolution are the tiers of boxes, the wide stage openings, and the central perspective, which lend her color photographs—ranging from 3.9 to 4.7 square meters in size—a spectacular brilliance. Among them is the perfectly preserved Teatro Comunale (1891) in Capri, with its horseshoe-shaped auditorium extending upward through three tiers of boxes and a gallery to an ornate ceiling adorned with goddesses of music, poetry, prose, and dance.
The history of theater predates that of photography, and Höfer’s photographic art delights in benefiting from the brilliant architects and patrons of the past whom she so admires. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Venice’s Teatro La Fenice—destroyed by arson—was reconstructed largely true to the original 1790 design by Aldo Rossi, reopened between 2003 and 2005, and published by Candida Höfer as an inkjet print in 2011.
The Schauspielhaus Linz originated from an old box theater and is today a modern tiered theater. It reopened in 1958 with Richard Strauss’s Arabella and a ceiling fresco titled Orpheus and the Animals by Fritz Köhler. Since 2013, it has been devoted exclusively to drama and restored to the 1950s aesthetic designed by Clemens Holzmeister. Candida Höfer photographed it in 2014.
The history of these buildings alone would merit an exhibition of its own—one that a theater museum would be tasked with mounting—given that Naples’ originally royal opera house, the Teatro Mercadante, once hosted such renowned artists as Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Höfer made her photograph there in 2009; since 2015, it has held the status of a national theater.
– Helga Meister
