Masterpiece, fridge magnet, phone case opera: how Hokusai's The Great Wave hit the stage

"Opera has inspired many of the 20th century's greatest artists to create extraordinary sets. Oskar Kokoschka designed a Magic Flute for Salzburg and a Ballo in maschera for Florence. Salvador Dali produced a controversial Salome for London; David Hockney's designs for Glyndebourne's Rake's Progress complement Stravinsky's sound-world so miraculously that they are still in use 50 years after their creation. Marc Chagall's ceiling fresco for Paris's Opera Garnier and murals for the New York Met testify to the intimate connection between opera and painting."

"And yet remarkably few operas portray visual artists. Something about their painstaking work seems to resist representation in this most extravagant of artforms. Only two operas about artists are regularly performed: Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, depicting the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grunewald, and Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini and Cellini gave Berlioz a head-start with his rollicking memoirs about his scandalous adventures in 16th-century Florence. He constantly reinvented himself, using at least 30 different names"

"Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, now known as Tokyo, then the world's largest city with over a million inhabitants. He lived to 88 at a time when only a handful of Japanese each year passed 60. His life was eventful: he survived being struck by lightning, a stroke that forced him to relearn how to draw, and a fire that destroyed his studio."

Opera inspired major twentieth-century artists to create extraordinary sets, including Kokoschka, Dalí, Hockney and Chagall. Despite strong visual ties, remarkably few operas portray visual artists, with Hindemith's Mathis der Maler and Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini among the rare regularly performed examples. Scottish Opera's The Great Wave takes a piece of art—the famous Hokusai print—as its subject, examining the artist's life and work. Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, lived to eighty-eight, survived lightning, a stroke and a studio fire, and produced a prolific and diverse output, with some 30,000 surviving works including paintings, sketches and illustrated volumes.

Read at www.theguardian.com