Josef Hoffmann

When Richard Wagner opened his new Festival Theatre at Bayreuth in August 1876 with the first complete Ring of the Nibelung, the Rhine had to flow, Valhalla had to burn, and a dragon had to cross the stage. The scenery for that founding festival came from a Viennese landscape painter, Josef Hoffmann.

Born in Vienna in 1831, Hoffmann built his career on atmospheric landscapes and on design for the theatre. He had met Wagner in Vienna and worked on decorations for the court opera before the composer entrusted him with the visual world of the Ring in 1876. His painted sets shaped how the first audiences pictured the gods, rivers and forests of Wagner's cycle.

He went on painting landscapes and working for the stage in Vienna until his death there in 1904, decades after the scenery for that first Ring had been struck and replaced.