For fine art, you go to the museum, especially in Amsterdam and especially now that all the museums have reopened. But there is also another option: the opera. There you see visual art that doesn't fit in any museum, not even in the largest room of the Rijksmuseum.
Take Greek sculptor Jannis Kounellis. From today, his work can be seen at the National Opera & Ballet for a month. Using a lot of steel - and to the horror of the theatre technicians it had to be real steel - he made the breathtaking set for Wagner's Lohengrin. Wagner heavy? Yes, with Kounellis it is. Never before had the Men of Brabant from the opera sounded so literally like a wall of sound. And no sooner had they also visually formed a stunning contrast to the swan feathers in the intimate moments.
"The bigger the set, the more fun!" is also the motto of American sculptor and architect George Tsypin. In Amsterdam, he realised several sets, but he impressed most with the sets for, again, Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen. So big and so immense that after the last revival, The National Opera decided not to add storage costs to its annual budget any longer. So gone. Only the wooden circle of Die Walküre has escaped that fate with an eye on a future resumption.
Well preserved, for decades, are the sets David Hockney created in 1975 for Stravinsky's The rake's progress. Thanks to the Reisopera, it could still be seen across our country in 2005. A travelling exhibition, as it were. They may not be completely original after all these years, although not a millimetre of them may be changed without the artist's express permission. After that, he made many other sets, but this one is rightly a classic, with countless small details.
For the grand gesture, and for artworks that don't fit in any theatre, we have to go to Anish Kapoor. His set for Parsifal was somewhat disappointing - some believe this was mainly due to the fact that he was simultaneously working on a tower to mark the London Olympics - but the immense mirror made up for a lot.
Dutch artists are of course not missing. Karel Appel was involved in several opera productions, but nowhere so playful, so inventive and so surprising as in Die Zauberföte - museum-worthy from start to finish. A fine task for Wim Pijbes.
Opera is not museum art and so sets disappear. Sometimes literally: in a shredder. So if you want to see monumental visual art while you still can, you would do well to go to the theatre. An added advantage: you can watch it for hours without being disturbed - no compelling 'please move on!'
And with beautiful music as its soundtrack.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
