Panos Aravantinos

On 14 December 1925 the Berlin State Opera gave the first performance of Wozzeck, the opera the Viennese composer Alban Berg had worked on for years and that much of the press had called unperformable. Erich Kleiber conducted, after forcing through more rehearsals than any house would normally grant. Franz Ludwig Hörth directed, and the sets came from the opera's own designer, a painter from Corfu named Panos Aravantinos.

He had trained as a painter first, at evening classes in Athens and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, which he finished in 1907, with a spell in Paris after that. Germany noticed him in 1920, through his designs for Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten. He stayed at the State Opera from 1919 until the end of his life, worked with conductors like Kleiber and Otto Klemperer, built well over 100 productions, and from 1926 held the title of artistic adviser to several Berlin theatres. Constructivism, expressionism and the Russian avant-garde all show up in his drawings, and so does ancient Greek ornament.

The painting never stopped. Children in Courtyard, his canvas in the National Gallery collection in Greece, dates from 1910, from before the theatre took him over. He died of pneumonia in Paris on 1 December 1930, at 46. The 1,300 designs, sketches and models he had left to the city of Piraeus became a museum inside its municipal theatre.