Rainer Sellmaier
Set & Costume Designer
© Ingo Höhn
The set and costume designer Rainer Sellmaier made his debut at Oper Frankfurt in 2018 with Meyerbeer's L’Africaine, which was followed by La forza del destino, this production of Nielsen's Maskerade (buy the DVD!) and Rudi Stephan's Die Ersten Menschen / The First People, the world premiere of which took place in Frankfurt in 1920. He has worked closely with the director Tobias Kratzer, with whom he won the 2008 Graz Ring Award, for many years. Their recent productions have included Gounod's Faust at the Opéra National de Paris, Mozart's Lucio Silla at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Beethoven's Fidelio at the Royal Opera House in London, Zemlinsky'sThe Dwarf, Strauss' Intermezzo and Arabella at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival, Rossini's Moïse et Pharon at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and La gazza ladra and Schwanda the Bagpiper at the Musiktheater an der Wien. They also staged Weinberg's The (female) Passenger and Das Rheingold (the start of a new Ring) at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. Other important proudctions for which he designed sets and costumes have included Anna Bolena and Carmen in Lucerne, Rigoletto and Bach's St. John Passion at Wermland Opera in Karlstad (Sweden) and Der Rosenkavalier at Theater Bremen. He also worked on Schwemmer's Robin Hood with the director Nelly Danker and Falstaff with Johannes Pölzgutter at the Staatstheater in Saarbrücken. He received several nominations for set designer of the year in Opernwelt magazine for Les contes d’Hoffmann in Amsterdam, L’Africaine at Oper Frankfurt and Gluck's Telemaco at the Schwetzingen Festival, and costume designer of the year for Götterdämmerung at the Staatstheater in Karlsruhe. Rainer Sellmaier studied history of art and theatre in Munich and set and costume design at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and started his career at Theater Regensburg.