Joachim Klein
Lighting Designer
© Wolfgang Runkel
Joachim Klein, a lighting designer and lighting master at Oper Frankfurt since 1994, became head of the lighting department in 2013. This season he lights new productions of Henze's Der Prinz von Homburg, Magnard's Guercœur, Reimann's L'invisible and Handel's Alcina. Recent productions for which he designed the lighting included Cimarosa's L’italiana in Londra, Nielsen's Maskerade, Schönberg / Frank Martin's Warten auf Heute (Waiting for Today) / Jedermann, Rossini's Bianca e Falliero, Die Zauberflöte and Orlando (both directed by Ted Huffman), Die Meistersinger (Johannes Erath), Carmen, Salome and Handel's Hercules (Barrie Kosky) and Rudi Stephan's The First People, which you can catch again during the 2025/26 season and was performed for the first time at Oper Frankfurt in 1920, directed by Tobias Kratzer. These were followed in 2023/24 by Don Pasquale (first seen at the 2022 Tirol Festival in Erl), Le nozze di Figaro, Le Grand Macabre, Aida and Giulio Cesare in Egitto. He teamed up with Kosky for Die Fledermaus at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and Il trittico for De Nationale Opera in Amsterdam. Other productions in Frankfurt have included Tri sestry, I puritani, La forza del destino, Rodelinda, Król Roger, Handel's Rinaldo (Bockenheimer Depot), the world premiere of Arnulf Hermann's Der Mieter / The Tenant (commissioned by Oper Frankfurt), Capriccio, From the House of the Dead and Manon Lescaut. Guest engagements, with directors including Peter Konwitschny, Christof Loy, Claus Guth, Harry Kupfer, David Hermann, Willy Decker and Johannes Erath have taken him to places including the Salzburg Easter Festival, Graz (La traviata, Pique Dame and Elektra), Göteborg (Lucrezia Borgia), the Hamburg State Opera (Cunning Little Vixen), Teatro Real in Madrid (Werther) and English National Opera in London (La traviata). Other productions have included Riehm's Sirenen, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cesti's L’Orontea, Euryanthe, Martinů's Three One Act Operas, Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern / Little Match Girl, Verdi's Stiffelio, and Handel's Radamisto in Frankfurt, The Fiery Angel (directed by Barrie Kosky) at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and Un ballo in maschera (directed by Johannes Erath). He received a British »Knight of Illumination Award« in 2014 for his lighting of Oper Frankfurt's Kosky production of Bluebeard's Castle , which also went on tour to the Edinburgh Festival, and another in 2016, for Saul (Kosky again) in Glyndebourne, for which he also received the 2017 Australian Helpmann Award for best lighting design.