JÜRGEN ROSE is one of the most important German stage and costume designers for all three theatrical genres - opera, ballet and drama - and has also made a name for himself as a director.
Born in Bernburg/Saale, Rose began working as an assistant to Franz Mertz at Gustav Rudolf Sellner's Landestheater Darmstadt immediately after graduating from high school. This was followed by two years at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the Schauspielschule in Berlin. Rose received his first engagement as an actor and stage designer in 1959 at the Städtische Bühnen Ulm, before coming to the Staatstheater Stuttgart in 1961 as a guest stage designer for the set of Shakespeare's play As You Like It. There he met the choreographer John Cranko, who, after Romeo and Juliet (1962), entrusted him with the sets for many of his most important choreographies, including Onegin (1965), Swan Lake (1963), Poème de l'extase (1970), Initials R.B.M.E. (1972) and Spuren (1973). He was also responsible for the set design of Cranko's production of the operetta The Merry Widow (1971).
Rose's versatile skills were also appreciated by other great choreographers such as John Neumeier, for whom he created sets and costumes for, among others, The Nutcracker (1974), Illusions – like Swan Lake (1967), The Sleeping Beauty (1978), Romeo and Juliet (1972/74), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977), The Lady of the Camellias (1978), Peer Gynt (1989) and A Cinderella Story (1992). For Marcia Haydée Rose created the sets for her legendary production of Sleeping Beauty (1987). Most recently, Rose designed the sets and costumes for a new production of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling (2019) as well as Edward Clug’s The Nutcracker (2022) – both for the Stuttgart Ballet.
Along with his numerous ballet productions, Rose also worked as a stage and costume designer in the fields of drama and opera. He worked at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, the Berlin Schillertheater and the Munich Residenztheater with important directors such as Rudolf Nolte, Hans Lietzau and Peter Stein. His name is particularly closely associated with the Münchner Kammerspiele, where he worked as a stage and costume designer from 1961 to 1971 under August Everding and from 1976 under Dieter Dorn. Rose designed numerous sets at the opera houses in Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, New York and London as well as at the festivals in Bayreuth and Salzburg.
From 1976 until his retirement in 2000, Rose was also Professor of Stage Design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. He has also staged opera productions himself, including La Traviata (1994) and Die Zauberflöte (1996) at the Bonn Opera House as well as Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo (2000), Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen (2002), Vincenzo Bellini's Norma (2006) and Jules Massenet's Werther (2006) at the Bavarian State Opera. In total, he has designed sets and costumes for over 300 productions. In 2019, his life's work of 3,642 graphic sheets and 111 models was acquired by the German Theater Museum in Munich to document five decades of theater history.