Sanjust, Filippo

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Sanjust, Filippo

Sanjust, Filippo , Italian stage designer and opera director; b. Rome, Sept. 9, 1925; d. there, Nov. 29, 1992. He studied architecture in Rome and at Princeton Univ. before turning to stage design. In 1958 Visconti chose him as designer for his staging of Don Carlos at London’s Covent Garden, and thereafter they collaborated successfully on various productions, including Il Trovatore at Covent Garden (1964) and Le nozze di Figaro in Rome (1964) and at the Metropolitan Opera in N.Y. (1968). Henze chose Sanjust as designer for the premieres of his Der junge Lord in Berlin in 1965 and for his The Bassarids at the Salzburg Festival in 1966. From 1969 Sanjust combined work as a stage designer with opera directing. Among his most distinguished productions were Ariadne auf Naxos (1976) and Falstaff (1980) in Vienna, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1979) in Brussels, and Simon Boccanega (1980) at Covent Garden.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire