Walther Volbach Collection on Adolphe Appia

Adolphe François Appia was born in Geneva in 1862, the son of Louis Paul Amédée Appia, a successful surgeon and one of the founders of the Red Cross. While a youth, he became fascinated with the theater, but since his family considered it an inappropriate career choice, he studied music at Geneva, Paris, Leipzig, and Dresden. In 1884 Appia met Houston Stewart Chamberlain and became devoted to the works of Richard Wagner. With the help and encouragement of Chamberlain, he decided to become a designer and stage director.

Although he received scant recognition during his lifetime, Appia is regarded today as the father of modern stage lighting and design. His reforms of the antiquated nineteenth-century practice of stage design emphasized the significance of time and space, the relation of stage and auditorium, and the contrast of light and shadow. He devoted much of his lifework in particular to creating new productions of the operas of Richard Wagner. Appia died on February 29, 1928, in a nursing home near Nyon, Switzerland.

Appia set down his theories on stage set design in two books and several essays, but much of his writing was published only in the 1950s and 1960s. The Fondation Adolphe Appia has as its objective the publication of all his works and the furtherance of his ideas. For further biographical information, see Walther R. Volbach's Adolphe Appia, Prophet of the Modern Theatre: A Profile (1968).

Walther Volbach was born in Mainz, Germany in 1897. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Munster in Westphalia in 1920, after completing his dissertation “The Development of Realism on the German Stage.” In the 1920s he was an assistant to Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and also worked as a stage director of plays and operas at the State theaters in Stuttgart and Berlin, at the Municipal theaters in Zurich, Danzig and Kiel, and at Vienna’s Volkstheater and Volksopera. He also served as an instructor at academies in Berlin, Vienna, and Kiel. After moving to the United States in the 1930s he taught and directed theater and opera in Ohio, Missouri, and Wisconsin. He was a professor in the Department of Theatre at Texas Christian University from 1946 until his retirement in 1965. His publications include Problems of Opera Production (1953); Adolphe Appia, Prophet of the Modern Theatre: A Profile (1968); and Adolphe Appia: Essays, Articles, and Scenarios (1989). He died in 1996.