Special Effects in "Der Freischütz"

An eagle drops from the sky, the target in front of the mill starts to smoke after a bullet hits it, the giant snake menacingly belches fire, and a drowned woman turns into a bridesmaid in less than four minutes. For all these special effects to work smoothly during a performance of Der Freischütz, day after day, the Props, Effects, and Costume/Wardrobe departments start their preparations in the afternoon.

It’s 4 p.m. All is calm still in the backstage area of the half-submerged Freischütz village. But that will change as the 9 p.m. curtain-up approaches. By that time a lot still needs to be done: special effects are got ready, props are put in place and costumes for the performers are taken to the dressing rooms.

Handiman for special effects
Dominik Hess is responsible for the special effects. Without him, the rifle that Max holds wouldn’t fire a shot. Then the scene wouldn’t be effective and the audience would probably think it “unrealistic”. So, Dominik Hess sees to it that there’s a bang at the end of the gun barrel and that smoke rises from the bullet hole. He begins work at 4 p.m. First, he replaces a box that’s mounted on a tree and wired up to explode when it receives a signal. Next, he pulls a cable through the rifle barrel and activates a radio unit in the stock. Finally he replaces the gas cylinders in the wagon, the church tower and the snake. The gas is for the fires that will burn on stage at these locations during the scene in the Wolf’s Ravine.

One special job is in the hands of the stunt team. On the church tower, at a height of 12 metres, a thread needs to be re-tied, so that the cross at the top of the spire can break at the end of the opera. The mechanism devised by the special effects team is as simple as it is effective: the flames burn through the thread. When it breaks, one of the two arms of the cross apparently snaps and slants downward. Before the performance begins, one of the stuntmen, well secured, nimbly climbs the spire, “repairs” the cross with a simple piece of thread so it is primed and ready for another evening.

All animals in position
At the same time, Julia Schultheis from the Props department is busy setting things up. The coffin that Kaspar drags into the Wolf’s Ravine is being made ready, so that the performer playing Kaspar, feeling his way in complete darkness, is able to find the skull and the mortar and remove them from the coffin. The scene in which the magic bullets are cast was repeatedly altered and replanned to minimise delay, with positions being changed and props being added or discarded.

In the scene with the hunters’ chorus, Kaspar triumphantly disembowels a stag he has shot. Julia Schultheis prepares this prop, too. She stuffs the stag carcass with remarkably lifelike intestines and places the animal in the right position.

Drying time: 20 hours
In the afternoon the dressing rooms for the singers and the stunt crew are empty because the costumes, mask and shoes are still in the drying rooms. In the course of a performance of Der Freischütz all the costumes get wet, some of them more than others. Diana Ferri is a member of what’s known as the wardrobe service. It’s her job to get everything dry again within 20 hours. To do so, she resorts to tried and tested remedies. Costumes that are particularly wet are spin-dried at night and hung up in a specially heated and ventilated room. In the process, she also uses drying appliances whose hoses look like elephant trunks: they make it possible to dry shoes from the inside.

From drowned woman to bridesmaid in four minutes flat
An extraordinary sight and currently the most photographed object on guided tours of the backstage area is a clothes rack laden with masks of dead bodies recovered from the water. Every one of these gruesome masks is individually made, so that in Der Freischütz no two corpses look alike. The wardrobe service puts the masks in the proper place for the stunt performers before the show. Stunt performers need to change costumes several times during the opera. They are ably assisted by Diana Ferri from the wardrobe service. In a perfectly “choreographed” routine, she transforms a stuntwoman from a ghoulish water corpse into a bewitching bridesmaid in just four minutes.

All these operations that are necessary behind the scenes so that the audience can enjoy an enthralling evening at the opera have now become second nature to the staff who carry them out, having been rehearsed so many times. When the singers arrive backstage, all the costumes and shoes are ready for them in the dressing rooms, the props are in their proper place and the special effects are primed. There’s a flurry of activity in the backstage area; the mood is one of joyful anticipation. At 9 p.m. on the dot, the Freischütz overture begins. And action!