Harald B. Thor

Harald B. Thor studied set and costume design at the Mozarteum in his home town of Salzburg, completing his studies there in 1982. In 1984, after an initial engagement at the Coburg Landestheater, he joined the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and two years later became its head of design. In 1999, after working with August Everding on the world premiere of Rolf Hochhuth’s Effis Nacht, he was appointed head of design and lecturer in stage design at Everding’s Bavarian Theatre Academy. In addition to his many set designs for Munich’s Prinzregententheater, he has also created the designs for theatres in Berlin, Mannheim, Vienna, Basel, Zurich, Moscow and Seoul.

Harald B. Thor has worked as a freelance designer since 2001. In the spoken theatre most of his set and costume designs have been for productions directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Their work has been seen at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, the Frankfurt Schauspiel, the Hanover Schauspiel, the Munich Akademietheater and Residenztheater, the Zurich Schauspielhaus and the Vienna Burgtheater, where his set designs for Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova earned him the coveted Nestroy Theatre Prize in 2016.

Much of Harald B. Thor’s work is focused on music theatre, in which capacity he has designed the sets for productions by many distinguished directors in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt, Paris, Seoul and Tokyo as well as the Salzburg Festival, where he made his debut with Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 2017. This is his Salzburg Whitsun Festival debut. For the Bavarian State Opera he has designed the sets for Die Soldaten, which won the prestigious Faust Theatre Award in 2014, for Wozzeck (2008, a coproduction with the New National Theatre in Tokyo), for the Ring (2012) and, most recently, for the English-language premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen in 2019.

In 2009 he designed the sets for the Cuban premiere of Die Zauberflöte at the Gran Teatro in Havana and together with the well-known Cuban sculptor Kcho designed the sets for Der fliegende Holländer at the Teatro Nacional de Cuba.
In the field of musicals he works principally with Stefan Huber. Harald B. Thor is also scenic art supervisor for Walt Disney Productions and as an architect has designed a number of concert halls and exhibitions.