Legendary late Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman's death last year was a great loss to Swedish film industry. Yet he is still alive. A guided tour of costumes used in Bergman's opera and stage in Swedish Royal Opera House shows many untold stories about Ingmar Bergman.
The current Royal Opera House, located on the other side of the Royal Palace in Stockholm, looks still the same as that of 1898. At the very back of the stage sat a young man with a black suit. That was the 13 year old Ingmar Bergman(his model). He often used his pocket money to come to the opera house and watched the opera. He was fascinated with opera. Later at home, he made a toy copy of the theatre with improved details with his own imagination.
Swedish Royal Opera House Many people know him because of the films he directed. But he started his career with opera theatre. One can see this part of history through the costume exhibition in the opera house during this summer.
Some of the oldest costumes existed since the 1700 century.
In his early career, Bergman liked Wagnar's music very much. In 1943, he got an assistant job at the opera house without any payment. But this gave him a good opportunity to realize his own dream.
Bergman paid great attention to his own copyright. It was said that he invented a kind of automatic controlled stage which was similar to that of the Queens Palace. But after the performance, he ordered to destroy it completely without leaving anything for others to copy.
Bergman was also a perfectionist.
On the stage, sometimes it needs a lot of masses actors or actresses. But even an action of an arm, a movement or the direction of the blood bleeding or the position of the blood in the clothes, if any of them was not right, he would ask everyone to redo it again and again until everything was satisfactory.
In later years after being famous for film director, he was back to the stage theatre
Again. But he found it was much difficult to cooperate with singers who would not obey him as easy as those film actress or actors. His last opera work was on stage in 1991.
His stage works include those of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Schiller, Shakespeare, Williams, O'Neill and Moliere with dozens of productions of such plays as Ghosts, Mary Stuart, The Bacchae, The Misanthrope, The Winter's Tale, Miss Julie, Long Day's Journey into Night, King Lear, the Seagull and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Bergman was born on July 14, 1918 in Uppsala in a clergyman's family and died on July 30th 2007. This month marks his 90th birth year and one year after his death.
By Xuefei Chen, People's Daily Online correspondent in Stockholm.
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