John Conklin, a celebrated designer of scenery for opera and theater, who tapped a boundless knowledge of music and art history, as well as an instinct for disruption, to create memorable sets for New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera and, most notably, the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York, died on June 24 in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was 88.
His death was confirmed in a statement by Glimmerglass, the nonprofit summer opera company in Cooperstown.
Mr. Conklin designed the scenery — and, in some cases, the costumes — for more than 40 Glimmerglass productions, starting in 1991. He remained active with the company even after his retirement in 2008, and he served as the scenic designer for all four shows of this summer’s season: “Tosca,” “Sunday in the Park With George,” “The House on Mango Street” and “The Rake’s Progress.”
The term “prodigy” rarely applies to set designers, but Mr. Conklin’s instincts were on full display in his youth. Growing up in Hartford, Conn., he attended symphonies and operas with his family, and by 10, he was building his own models, based on photographs he found perusing the magazine Opera News.
“I was drawn to opera,” he said in a 2019 interview with Opera America, a New York-based industry organization, “because it was music and because it had the power of music, but it also had the power of theater; and the power of painting; and the power of architecture; and the power of dance. So it seemed like the ideal thing to do.”
Colleagues said his flashes of inspiration could come from anywhere, at a moment’s notice. The director Daniel Fish recalled Mr. Conklin’s work on a 2007 Bard College production of “Oklahoma!,” the basis for Mr. Fish’s critically acclaimed runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, on London’s West End and on Broadway, where it won two Tonys in 2019.
In an early meeting about the production, “John reached into one of the drawers in his studio and pulled some sparkly fringe, a miniature version of the stuff you see hanging over used-car lots, and asked, ‘What if we hung this over the space?,” Mr. Fish said in an email. “That ‘what if’ was key to John’s creative process.”
For the later iterations of the show’s production design, Mr. Conklin passed the baton to Lee Jellinek, a former student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Mr. Conklin taught design and dramaturgy for more than four decades. The fringe, however, remained.
“It set the tone for the show,” Mr. Fish said.
As Kelley Rourke, the Glimmerglass dramaturg, put it in an interview: “He had the unique ability to walk into the theater with fresh eyes. His designs could be highly conceptual and intellectually challenging, but others were dominated by a sense of childlike play.”
“The Rake’s Progress,” with music by Igor Stravinsky and a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, tracks the decline and fall of an idealistic young man whose Faustian pact with the devil grants his every wish, but lands him in an asylum. (The Glimmerglass production debuts on Saturday).
“The Rake’s Progress” has traditionally been set in 18th-century London. But Mr. Conklin brought a crisp midcentury elegance to the production, rendering the locations in the abstract, with “iconic shapes and colors referencing the Color Field painters of that time — people like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly,” he was quoted as saying in a recent Glimmerglass news release.
He also collaborated with the projection designer Greg Emetaz to splash the stage with geometric patterns inspired by Saul Bass, whose modernist title sequences for countless films, including “West Side Story,” “North by Northwest” and the 1960 “Ocean’s Eleven,” are hailed as art in their own right.
Mr. Conklin never let the heritage of an opera dictate his direction. “John would say that a designer should not have a style,” Ms. Rourke said, “but instead come fresh to the music and the text, and respond to what it’s telling them.”
In the Opera America interview, for example, he took issue with the idea that the opera world is a museum “in which masterpieces are collected and preserved,” forever true to their original time and place. He believed that context mattered.
“There is no ideal production of ‘Tosca’ that is true to everything,” Mr. Conklin said. “A Rembrandt self-portrait hanging at the Met is very different than a Rembrandt self-portrait hanging in Amsterdam.”
He added, “I treat any opera as a new opera, to be explored as if it had never been performed.”
John Marshall Conklin was born on June 22, 1937, in Hartford, the eldest of three children of William Conklin, the chairman of a family-owned metal fabrication company, and Anne (Allen) Conklin, a church and community volunteer.
He began working on set design as a high school student at Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford. After graduating in 1955, he continued his studies at Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1959. (He returned to Yale to earn a Master of Fine Arts from the university’s drama school in 1966.)
The year before he received his undergraduate degree, he made his professional debut at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, where he would go on to design more than 30 shows. In 1966, he was able to realize his childhood dream of designing the sets for a production at New York City Opera, “Dialogues of the Carmelites” by Francis Poulenc.
Mr. Conklin made his Glimmerglass debut in 1991 with productions of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” and Mozart’s “Il Re Pastore.” In 1996, Paul Kellogg, Glimmerglass’s artistic director, was hired to lead New York City Opera as well, and named Mr. Conklin director of production for both companies.
Over the course of Mr. Conklin’s career, he designed the sets for two complete Wagner “Ring” cycles, for the San Francisco Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago. His work with the Metropolitan Opera in New York included the world premiere of “The Ghosts of Versailles,” with music by John Corigliano and libretto by William M. Hoffman, in 1991.
That work, set 200 years after the French Revolution, involved the ghosts of aristocrats hovering around the Palace of Versailles. Mr. Conklin’s sets were “populated with floating signs of France’s past, creating an eerie world of suspended objects and shattered staircases,” the critic Edward Rothstein wrote in a review for The New York Times.
Mr. Conklin is survived a brother, Edward, and a sister, Anne Conklin Gatling.
If his work defied expectations as well as tradition, Mr. Conklin was fine with that. “More than anyone I know, his approach to work and life was Socratic,” Mr. Fish said. “Questions meant so much to him; he was suspicious of answers, certainly easy ones.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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