STYLE / STYLEMAKER : Shapes With Shadows

David Hockney remembers the first opera he saw: a production of “La Boheme” in Bradford, England. “I’m sure it was tacky, really, but to a 10-year-old boy, it looked unbelievably lavish,” he says. His passion for music and theater flowered, and he has taken long breaks from painting to design nine operas and three ballets over the past 20 years. His sets for Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” won praise at the L.A. Music Center in 1987. Earlier this month, his sets appeared in Puccini’s “Turandot” in San Francisco and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in New York.

Now it’s L.A.’s turn again. Tonight, and over the next two weeks, the L.A. Opera presents Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten.” “The Woman Without a Shadow,” rarely performed in America, is a symbolic drama of an empress who must discover selfless love before she can conceive a child. Hockney jumped at the invitation of an old friend, stage director John Cox, to design a joint production for London’s Royal Opera House and the L.A. Opera. “It’s very grand and exciting theater,” says the artist, “but the music is complicated, and I had to listen to it many times before I realized how ravishingly beautiful it is.” To avoid distractions, he loaded CDs into his car stereo at night and drove to Santa Barbara and back, playing the opera at full volume.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, who made movies in his head and then recorded them on film with his actors, Hockney wants everything to be perfect before he arrives at the theater. Working with assistants Richard Schmidt and Gregory Evans, and costume designer Ian Falconer, Hockney spent many months creating sets and elaborate lighting cues on a large scale model in his Hollywood Hills studio.

Inspiration came quickly. “I made a little abstraction of a landscape and a river on the first day,” Hockney recalls. “The opera is about creativity--the making of babies. The river expresses the life force and, at the end, suggests both a tree and human sperm.” The characters inhabit a world of rich color, sublime lighting and abstract shapes that evoke the spirit world, jagged mountains and a dyer’s paint-streaked hut.

This world of fantasy and symbol is a far cry from Hockney’s first opera sets, inspired by Hogarth’s classic engravings, for Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” To escape the bustle of Paris, where he was then working, he went into hiding at the Chateau Marmont, remembering that Stravinsky had written the opera during his exile in L.A. Hockney had already decided to move here for keeps--ever since he noticed that the sun always shone in his favorite Laurel and Hardy movies. “You didn’t see long shadows like that in Bradford,” he says. Since then, the space, light and color of Southern California have infused his art, onstage and at the easel.

In “That’s The Way I See It” (Chronicle Books), the newly published continuation of his autobiography, Hockney recalls the frustrations of presenting “Die Frau” in London, where a key rehearsal was eliminated and lighting errors were corrected only at the final performance. “I felt a very deep satisfaction on that last night and I thought, it did work,” he writes. “It cost me a lot of money, but what does that matter? I did it, on one level, simply for my own pleasure.”