Sandpaper, varnish, paint and thousands of rhinestones

Bregenz, 12.7.2024. Waltraud Münzhuber, a costume expert from Munich, is head of the costume painting workshop at the Bregenz Festival. She and her team see to it that the costumes in Der Freischütz have stains in the right places, look mouldy, or gleam in the spotlight. “There’s a colour scheme behind every stage set, which also applies to the costumes. Essentially, we’re trying to tell the story of Der Freischütz in a coherent way in line with Philipp Stölzl’s directorial concept.”

The craft of costume painting
Dorothee Melzer is working meticulously on a broad leather belt, first with sandpaper and then with paint. She bends the leather a few times here and there to give it small tears. A distinctive hand movement that reveals a particular trade – such as contestants on the popular TV quiz show “What am I?” would have tried to guess, as older viewers in Austria may remember. In this case, the occupation involves using certain tricks to age clothing.

“We do all the decoration on the costume,” Waltraud Münzhuber explains and casually lists what’s required for the Bregenz production of Der Freischütz: “Think blood, think dirt, think revulsion…”. Weber’s opera plays with the thrill of horror, epitomising the Gothic horror of German Romanticism. 

Dorothee Melzer, who has worked at the theatre in Frankfurt for 30 years and has taken leave to work for the Bregenz Festival, is, together with Waltraud, the person with the longest experience in the six-strong costume painting team. Waltraud Münzhuber has been working as a freelance costume painter since 1999 alongside her second job as a hand weaver. She was previously employed at the Bavarian State Opera for nine years. 

Lovingly handcrafted
No vocational training exists for costume painting, even though such courses are often called for. So it’s a matter of learning by doing. To take one of many examples from this summer’s lake stage production, how can a costume detail of felt be made to look like the metal blade of an ice skate? In the end what it took was “six layers of transparent plastic – and the effect looks really good. I was really chuffed!" says Waltraud Münzhuber, holding the item in her hand. What may be more readily appreciable for the audience at Der Freischütz are the costumes of the water ballet dancers in Ännchen’s dream sequence. Each of the nine swimming costumes – one serves as a spare – is covered in thousands of glittering rhinestones. “I don’t know exactly how many there are, but every single one is actually glued on by hand. That’s four days you spend on one costume.” The costumes of the water sprites, on the other hand, are meant to look mouldy and algae-like, to gleam and on top of that they’ve got to be waterproof. “We tried out all kinds of different fabrics and colours.” 

Whether everything works as desired and planned will be revealed in the rehearsals that follow the development process. That began over a year ago. The first meeting with the costume designer took place in Bregenz before the summer of 2023. By the end of August, the first fabric samples had been ordered and assembled, so that “the two of us spent two weeks in Bregenz dyeing the first samples”. The first costumes went to the tailor’s and came back to be dyed and aged. In October and February, Waltraud Münzhuber and a colleague got together in Bregenz for another two weeks. “In April, there were already four of us here, to finalise the costumes for the chorus,” she reports. From 27 May, the costume painting workshop was at full strength. After all, 150 costumes are needed for Der Freischütz, and each of them is unique.

The more intensive the rehearsals become, the more requests for last-minute changes come in, but they don’t seem to trouble Waltraud Münzhuber and her team. Last Saturday, the main piano rehearsal took place on the lake stage, the first time under the same lighting conditions as the actual performances later. She shows a handwritten list of requests for adjustments to the costumes. “The list is relatively short,” she remarks in a casual way. That means she and the team did good work in the run-up to it? Waltraud Münzhuber nods.

(ami)