Tiefland

In 1918 and 1919, Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky designed the sets for a performance of Eugen Francis Charles d’Albert’s opera Tiefland at the Theatre of Musical Drama in Petrograd. The opera was directed by Josif Lapitsky (Mikhailov) and the premiere was held on 24 January 1919, after the merging of the Theatre of Musical Drama and the Axarin Theatre of Opera in the Bolshoi Opera Theatre at the People’s House. The set designs implied the possibility of transformations. Composed of enormous blocks of stone, a mountain hut turned, in the course of the action, into a cliff (prologue) and a windmill (Acts I and II). The artist romanticised the subject of the opera by transferring the action from a valley (the concentration of base passions) to the hills (a place of sublime feelings).