Alfred Roller

Roller had come up through the Vienna Secession, which he co-founded in 1897^[1]. From 1898 he edited Ver Sacrum, the Secession's journal, designing its first cover in an unconventional square format that arranged image and text into distinct zones. The central image showed a potted shrub breaking free of its container, a metaphor for what the Secession intended to do to Viennese art. He was elected president in 1902 and 1909. That same year he curated the fourteenth Secession exhibition, the celebrated Beethoven show, designing the visitor experience as a processional journey from darkness to light, centred on Max Klinger's monumental sculpture of the composer.

Born in Brno (then Brünn, in the Habsburg Empire) in 1864^[1], Roller had studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. His theatre designs for Mahler were notable for their use of atmospheric light rather than illustrative scenery: for Tristan, enormous towers that could be repositioned to suggest different spaces, with colour and shadow doing the descriptive work. Mahler called it a revelation. The production drawings for their joint projects, including Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, remain remarkable documents of early modern theatre.

After Mahler left Vienna in 1907^[1], Roller continued designing for the Staatsoper and for the Salzburg Festival, working with Max Reinhardt. He died in Vienna in 1935^[1].