Among the many backstage jobs that have a huge impact on a performance but are not often talked about, is the role of the lighting designer. It is not just about making sure that the audience sees what's on stage: lighting creates the atmosphere, sets the mood, helps with storytelling and enhances the talent of the performers on stage.
To find out more, we spoke with Ulrich Niepel, lighting designer and current Head of Lighting at Deutsche Oper Berlin. For over 30 years he has designed lighting for opera productions all over the world, including Madrid, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Beijing, Bregenz, Seville, Bergen, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Montpellier and more.
How did you become a lighting designer?
I am an example of the “learning by doing” principle: I started to work at the Bayreuther Festspiele as a light technician and learned nearly everything about light design from my teacher Manfred Voss, a very experienced man, who got really famous by doing the light design of Patrice Chéreau's spectacular Ring cycle. With him I worked on the Ring cycles of Alfred Kirchner and Jürgen Flimm, before I took over the job of the Head of Lighting at the Bayreuther Festspiele in 2004 and did the design for the Ring of Tankred Dorst in 2006.
Can you tell me more about your creative process?
The most important thing is to start from listening to the music several times. You then meet with the production team, learn about the director's concept and design the technical plans. As soon as the rehearsals start, I attend as many as them as possible, to get into the spirit of the production and to learn how the stage design is used. I then develop the plans according to staging needs.
What makes a lighting design ‘good’?
We want to create interesting, unusual, unconventional images that attract the audience. And it is always part of a good lighting design if the temperature of a performance is not always the same. To say it in an image: the soloists might not always be in full light, but it is better if they also have moments in the shadows. Manfred Voss said: “Light might also be dirty.”
Why are operas often so dimly lit?
I think this was much more the case in the past. Wieland Wagner or Herbert von Karajan often preferred dimly lit stages because they liked the darkness and the mystery that was created by obscurity. If you think of Karajan's Il trovatore, you hardly see anything like that nowadays. In the past some singers, like Lucia Aliberti, were also very strict about not wanting lights to blind them, as were some dancers who asked for “the spotlights not to touch their head”. But today the lighting equipment has so much more power and operas can be extremely bright.