Designer. He designed the sets and costumes for the new Willy Decker production of Moses and Aaron opening the latest Ruhrtriennale Festival. There is considerable demand, worldwide, for new revivals of his previous work: for instance the Decker/Gussmann production of Die tote Stadt, originally made for the Salzburg Festival, will be presented at the Teatro Real Madrid and the Opéra National de Paris. For the Metropolitan Opera New York he is preparing an adaptation of La Traviata, another production with Decker. After graduating, he first worked as a painter of theatre sets before being engaged by stage director/designer Herbert Wernicke as his personal assistant. Gussmann worked on more than 20 productions as an assistant, before becoming a set/costume designer in his own right.

   His first such engagement was in 1979, for the opera house in Darmstadt. Since then, he has been working as a freelance set and costume designer, and almost exclusively, first with Willy Decker and, from 1992, also with Andreas Homoki. Work with these two renowned stage directors has dominated his professional life. Yet, there were also productions with stage directors such as Harry Kupfer, Johannes Schaaf, and Reto Nickler.

   His output has been prolific, over 150 productions for opera houses such as the Vienna State Opera; the opera houses of Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, and Stuttgart; Deutsche Oper and Komische Oper Berlin; the Leipzig and Cologne Opera Houses; the Ruhrtriennale and the Salzburg Festival; the Bastille, Palais Garnier, and Châtelet in Paris; De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam, and La Scala di Milano, and also the opera houses of Florence, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, Naples, Barcelona, Madrid, Geneva, Lyon, Montpellier, Seville, Oslo, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Brussels, Santa Fe, and San Francisco. The many adaptations and remakes of his sets and costumes have been seen throughout Europe, North America, and Japan. Besides winning numerous critical awards in France, Italy and Spain, he was awarded the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2002, honouring his contribution to the cultural life of France.

   At the Polish National Opera, he designed the sets and costumes for Elektra directed by Willy Decker (2010).

Photo: Archive