ABSTRACT
The challenge of staging the works of Richard Wagner provided Appia with his first and most fundamental task, one leading ultimately to the provision of a completely new approach to theatrical art. Preoccupied to the point of obsession with the problem of adequately realizing Wagner’s works in the theatre, Appia spent the last decade of the nineteenth century focusing all his creative resources and mental energy on its solution. This achievement was prodigious and, eventually, its effect upon contemporary staging – indeed upon the very concept of the theatre – was revolutionary. Within a period of fewer than ten years, Appia articulated theories and expressed them in designs that swept away the foundations that had supported European theatre practice since the Renaissance. In their place he laid down what became the conceptual and practical basis for theatrical art for many years to come. As Lee Simonson wrote, Appia’s theories
elucidated the basic aesthetic principles of modern stage design, analysed its fundamental technical problems, outlined their solution, and formed a charter of freedom under which scene designers still practice … The light in Appia’s first drawings, if one compares them to the designs that had preceded his, seem the night and morning of a First Day.
(Simonson 1932: 352, 359)