Masterpiece to stage: Hokusai’s The Great Wave as an opera

Opera has long attracted painters and designers: Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney and Marc Chagall all created memorable stage work. Yet surprisingly few operas centre on visual artists, with only Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini regularly performed.

By taking a famous print as its subject, Scottish Opera’s The Great Wave therefore enters largely uncharted territory. Katsushika Hokusai, born in Edo in 1760, lived to the age of 88 and produced a vast and varied output: paintings, sketches, the Hokusai Manga drawing manual and thousands of woodblock prints.

His most celebrated image, originally titled Under the Wave off Kanagawa, comes from the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and has become ubiquitous on everything from fridge magnets to phone cases, even if its creator is less widely known.

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