walk through David Hockney's immersive opera designs

Browse David Hockney’s immersive opera scene designs

Inside the immersive opera stage designs by artist David Hockney are fantastical worlds filled with vivid colors, “forced” perspective and three-dimensional spaces. Since the 1970s, the artist has designed sets and costumes for productions at some of the greatest opera houses in the United States and Europe. These are not collaborations where he provided a sketch and let the in-house production team realize it. They are complete visual environments: painted sets, dimensional sets and costume designs. All are built by the same spirit of color and perspective that runs through his paintings and that he sees, but the difference is that the canvas is a stage, the scale is architecture, and the audience sits inside the work. In this way, the actors play within his plays.

In 2027, viewers will be able to revisit his fantastical operatic settings, as Tate Modern has announced that in the summer of next year, the Turbine Hall is to host a multimedia installation built around this body of work. The Turbine Hall has a ceiling of 524 panes of glass and the productions designed by David Hockney for the stage will be shown on huge screens inside, immersing visitors in the world of his opera. The installation marks his 90th birthday, and the same period as the reportthere is a separate career retrospective of over 200 works due to open at Tate Britain in October 2027 and run until February 2028.

Tristan and Isolde | all images courtesy of Los Angeles Opera

Forced perspectives and colors define the sets

His immersive opera sets artist David Hockney started with color used as structures. For Tristan und Isolde, the Wagner production he first designed in 1987, blue carries the production from start to finish. Tristan wears blue. The sky and the cliff that defines the scene’s forced perspective are blue. When a surface shines with one color, the moments when another color appears stand out and draw attention. Isolde’s red suit then shines without needing to accentuate it. It is already the blue color that does this job.

Forced perspective is the other tool that David Hockney brings from his painting to his opera designs, which viewers can begin to feel and experience during his multimedia exhibition at Tate Modern in 2027. It is a technique that makes objects appear either closer or further away from the viewer than their natural position, and on a stage, where the audience is looking at a fixed plane without being created by a fixed distance. In the drawings of Tristan und Isolde, a cliff edge sits in the center of the scene and seems to look out through a void. The horizon feels out of reach and the stage feels bigger than it is.

scenography for Tristan and Isolde

Artist’s multimedia exhibition at tate modern

For Die Frau ohne Schatten – Richard Strauss’s 1919 fantasy opera, designed by David Hockey in 1992 – the approach changes because the sets fill the stage with motifs. Orbs sit embedded in the landscape and texture appears on all surfaces. One of the main characters is a cloth dyer by trade, and the production shows just that with a visual density that the Wagner set lacks. Where Tristan is a study in open space and melancholy blues, Die Frau is a demonstration of how much a stage can hold.

Many of David Hockney’s immersive opera set designs are to be brought to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installation. It will not be a concert or a live production, but a space where these designs surround the visitor, immersing them digitally just as their physical counterparts have done. The Hall already housed a steel spider, a crack in the floor, a row of giant metal sunflower seeds and a weather installation that produced fog. In the summer of 2027, it is to become what it was not before: an opera without a stage.

stage design Turandot