Johannes Leiacker
Set Designer
© Monika Rittershaus
Johannes Leiacker is sought-after world wide as a set and costume designer for opera and plays. A regular guest at Oper Frankfurt, recent triumphs have included R.B. Schlather's new Madame Butterfly (revival: May 2023), Christof Loy’s Rimsky-Korsakov The Night before Chrismas (»Performance of the Year« Opernwelt magazine 2021/22), Katharina Thoma’s Tristan und Isolde, Johannes Erath’s Król Roger, Brigitte Fassbaender's Capriccio, this season's Mercadante's Francesca da Rimini (a Frankfurt First which opened in Erl last winter) and this wonderful Loy production of Don Giovanni. His set for Königskinder at the Nationale Opera Amsterdam was unveiled this October and other engagements have taken him to places including the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Vienna State Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, Los Angeles Opera, Houston Grand Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, opera houses in Madrid, Brussels, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Moscow and Tokyo and the Salzburg, Bregenz and Baden-Baden festivals. He works regularly with the directors Peter Konwitschny (most recently on Les Huguenots and Norma at the Semperoper in Dresden), Christof Loy, with whom he staged Salome at Finnish National Opera in Helsinki and Schreker's Der Schatzgräber at the Deutsche Oper Berlin last season, and enjoyed great success with Verdi's Luisa Miller at the 2021 Glyndebourne Festival, Dietrich Hilsdorf and Rolando Villazón. He and Christof Loy's production of Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden won the 2010 Laurence Olivier Award and their Peter Grimes at the Theater an der Wien was voted Best Production at the 2016 International Opera Awards. He won the 2021 »Rudi Häussler Prize« from the Semperoper Foundation in Dresden, where he was a professor at the University of Fine Arts until 2010. He was voted »Set Designer of the Year« by Opernwelt magazine in 1996, 2009 and 2018.