With the sudden death of Maria Bjornson at the age of 53, Scottish Opera and other British companies have lost one of their most gifted stage and costume designers.
Her Glasgow association began early, at the Citizens' Theatre, after Philip Prowse had spotted her work as a member of Ralph Koltai's class at the Central School of Art and Design in London. So impressed was he that he invited her to Scotland where, with her fellow graduate Sue Blane, she spent two formative years, designing, among other things, Three Sisters for Giles Havergal, Tiny Alice for Robert David Macdonald, and Tamburlaine at the Edinburgh Festival for Prowse himself.
Later, her starkly poetic decor for David Pountney's production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova at the Wexford Festival led to her memorable Janacek cycle for Scottish Opera, again with Pountney as director. Presented in conjunction with Welsh National Opera, and marking the start of Richard Armstrong's developing relationship with Scotland, these were memorably unified events, proving that co-productions can be made to work when they are in the right hands.
Designing Katya Kabanova for the second time, Bjornson did it quite differently, but no less poetically. Her cluttered, claustrophobic Makropoulos Case was unforgettable, as was her droll and adorable Cunning Little Vixen, unveiled at the Edinburgh Festival. But her triumph was surely From the House of the Dead, which Scottish Opera keeps promising to revive, but never quite succeeds in doing so.
When Pountney ceased working so frequently with Scottish Opera, Bjornson likewise cut back, though together they did an imaginative, original Die Walkure for English National Opera, with an unusally domestic act one which could have come out of an Ibsen play (Bjornson's father was Norwegian and her mother, who survives her, comes from Romania; Bjornson was born in Paris).
Alas, this promising approach to The Ring did not go down well in London, and, indeed, the cycle was never completed.
Bjornson's career, however, went from strength to strength. With Graham Vick, whom she had met during his prentice period with Scottish Opera, she did a vivid, utterly Italian presentation of Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which I reviewed (in these pages) from the Florence Maggio Musicale. Compared by Italian critics with a Fellini film, it would have been worth bringing to the Edinburgh Festival.
At Covent Garden, during the same period, a controversial Sleeping Beauty rehearsed simultaneously with another Katya Kabanova was thought to have overstretched her, and she was mercilessly pilloried in the television documentary, The House. As a deeply serious designer, she reacted to this with justifiable distress.
But having already triumphed internationally with her sensationally designed Phantom of the Opera - certainly the most famous stagework of her career - she knew what she was capable of. More recently she has worked with Graham Vick again at La Scala, Milan, has designed the forthcoming production of Berlioz's The Trojans at the New York Metropolitan, and had been intending to renew her collaboration with David Pountney at the Bregenz Festival
in 2005.
Maria Bjornson, designer; born February 16, 1949; died December 13, 2002.
CONRAD WILSON
