The opening of this year's Opera Festival in Munich presented a spectacular opportunity: Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and the Bavarian State Opera itself all celebrate their 200th birthday this year. As a result, the opera house staged Wagner vs Verdi, a playful contest in which the two great composers met each other as giant marionettes in the plaza outside the Bavarian State Opera house.
Cheered on by about 10,000 visitors, the 9.5m high internally lit futuristic figures were moved by cranes like puppets, while the faces of two actors were projected onto the faces - creating the dialogue between the two composers.
The 'contest' began around 10pm as it became dark enough for lighting and video (the two essential elements of this spectacle). Music by the two famous composers was complemented with pieces by contemporary church music composer Moritz Eggert.
Bayerischen Staatsoper master electrician Benedikt Zehm designed the entire lighting concept and was responsible for its implementation. Tina Emmerich sat at the lighting control desk, which was housed in a scaffolding tower in the middle of the square. Lighting and video technician sat side by side.
Michael Bauer, head of lighting at the Staatsoper in Munich, chose to use an ETC Gio desk to control the mixed rig, which included 14 MAC 2000s, 21 LED spotlights by JB Lighting, and 10 GLP Impression 120s, via three wireless DMX transmitters.
For Tina Emmerich, Gio was the absolute first choice to handle the range of different fixtures in use: "The large-scale distribution of different lighting throughout the plaza, in the front-of-house tower, in surrounding buildings, and on two stages - in addition to the two internally-lit marionettes themselves - can quickly become confusing.
"The Magic Sheets in the new Eos 2.0 software were an enormous help in keeping everything at a glance. I was able to build a topographic view of the entire rig, with flexible on-screen fixture symbols providing a quick overview, telling me, for example, which unit type is active in which colour. Also, different colour effects could be finely tracked and edited, even without actually having the devices within view.
"In addition, I found it very useful to be able to zoom into the Magic Sheet and store that setting in a snapshot along with other parts of the user interface. A more basic advantage is of course the easy selection via the touchscreen. For example, when asked to "make the arms red", it was simply faster to click on the group for Arms, than to have to maybe first look up a lot of channel numbers and then key those in."
Towards 10 o'clock, the crane's giants were hoisted up. In the darkness of the lighting tower, Tina Emmerich was pleased with the backlit keys and two tiltable LCD multitouch displays on her Gio console, which let her move lightning fast between all of her settings. Meanwhile, outside, the Residenz façade, a roof of the house across the way, a portal of the Opera, and a roof frieze were being elegantly lit, enthralling the spectators for a good hour, before the roaring applause began.
(Jim Evans)
