She may only be given a few short sentences in the Old Testament, but the Queen of Sheba has a starring role in the annals of art history. As a temptress, the embodiment of evil (complete with cloven feet) or a symbol of the exotic East, she has been depicted by legions of European artists, including Bernini and Piero della Francesca.
In Massimo Gasparon's design for Goldmark's Die Konigin Von Saba (The Queen Of Sheba) she is magnificent in a luminous, cobalt blue, strapless gown of ruched silk, with an empire waistline and jewel-encrusted bodice, matched by a choker and bracelets. She wears a geometric, Egyptian-style wig. This is her costume throughout the opera, which dramatically distinguishes her from the Hebrew women, clad in demure white and gold. King Solomon is resplendent in a silk robe of deep scarlet and matching velvet cloak, while the diplomat, Assad, wears a similar costume in a rich wine brown.
"The Queen is the first woman of the opera, of course," Gasparon says, lovingly fingering the cascades of electric blue silk. "In many ways she is a very modern figure. She's free - and she doesn't die." He takes a hard line on the Queen: "I think she's destructive and cynical in her treatment of Assad. She represents evil. But of course she's so much more interesting than Sulamith (Assad's betrothed), who is completely obvious - we can see exactly what she is."
Sulamith has to make do with a more insipid pale blue frock - also with an empire waist - and a sweetly virginal wedding dress, but when she becomes a nun in the final act she gets to wear the kind of black silk dress that would have women queuing up to join a convent.
When this young Italian designer discovered the modest dimensions of the Theatre Royal stage, he decided to keep his stage designs as simple as possible, and to concentrate on the vivid costumes. He and the director, Patrick Mailler, wanted to stress the clash of cultures, the contrast between the richly sensuous world of the Queen of Sheba and the religious orthodoxy of Jerusalem.
The stage design has an abstract, geometric quality, drawing freely on an eclectic range of visual sources from Greek Geometric pottery, to Minoan palace designs, with recurring spiral motifs. Four folding black panels with gold borders form a screen-cum-curtain, while the floor is covered in large tiles with a reflective gold sheen. "The black and gold introduces a faintly funereal tone from the beginning," Gasparon says.
In a pastiche of Bernini, a six-metre black sculpted column, with a twist of gold leaves in relief, dominates the back of the stage, ending up in four shattered pieces at the end of the opera. In the second act a tree made of gold leaves - based on the dome of Olbrich's Secession Building in Vienna - is the central image. More gold leaves entwine the grid that forms part of the Temple scene, and form part of the imposing gold candelabra, and the wreaths, garlands and breastplates of the Hebrew chorus of priests and soldiers.
The highly decorative, jewel-coloured paintings of the Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt, were the main inspiration for the designs, and Gasparon is consciously evoking the late 19th century Secession period in Vienna as a prism through which the Jerusalem court of King Solomon is reflected.
In the last three decades of the 19th century, Austrian architects and designers took the lead in the organisation that brought together all of Vienna's modernist artists: the Austrian Association of Visual Artists - also called the Secession, after a similar group in Munich.
The first exhibition in 1898 was a huge success and promoted the popularity of the Austrian style of art nouveau that became known as the Sezessionstil. Klimt, who was the first president of the Secession, applied gold and silver leaf to painted surfaces and his portraits of Viennese women combined abstract motifs with iconographic references to Byzantine painting and mosaics, to create secular icons.
"These were the images that Goldmark's music suggested to me," Gasparon says. "Die Konigin was first performed in Vienna in 1875, and we wanted to capture the visual flavour of that period." So the design is suggesting something generally ancient, rather than trying to be specifically historical or Biblical? "Yes, this is the great freedom you have in opera. It's important to remember that theatre is a representation, it's not real, it's . . .
Artifice? "Exactly."
Usually, this 30-year-old Venetian works on Baroque opera, which is "very conceptual, very abstract. Die Konigin is quite different, more Romantic and stylised." An architect by training, Gasparon has spent the past 10 years working in opera as both designer and director, and trained as the assistant to the talented Italian director, Pier Luigi Pizzi. Ideally he likes to direct and design (including costumes) productions so that the work has visual and conceptual coherence. "I approach opera as an architect," he says. "When I listen to a score, I first think of the space, I imagine the work as a whole, visualising everything. There are many similarities between the work of an architect and of a director: both are seeing a project in advance, working out every detail of what you need to put in place on stage. It is the same way of imagining the future."
Except that an architect doesn't usually see his or her building being dismantled again after a few weeks. "That is the only thing I find difficult. Storage of sets is so expensive that it's often cheaper to rebuild them from scratch. So, after all the work, it's all over after one month."
Gasparon has recently by-passed this problem by designing a theatre building, in perfect Baroque pastiche, resembling one of his sets, but which will stand permanently in Bibbiena, near Florence. Immortality at last? "You could say that," he beams.
