Michael Nyman’s Opera Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs and Questions of Interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Abstract
The article focuses on the interpretation of the themes and images of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Michael Nyman’s opera Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs. The authors touch upon the issues of the history of the creation of the work, the features of the libretto, which acquired the character of an intermittent narrative as a result of the radical reduction of the original source, and examine the compositional and dramatic patterns of the opera and its musical and stylistic specificities. In his interpretation, Nyman combines the traditional view of Shakespeare’s play as a metaphor for artistic creativity with its postcolonial reading. Compositional strategies are based on deconstruction techniques, manifested in depersonalization (the separation of voices from the roles, leading to a subtraction of the theatrical-stage component), the semantic gap between the text and the music, self-reference, and harmonic similarity, which makes it possible to establish a commonality between characters that are essentially opposite (Caliban and Prospero), which contributes to a re-evaluation of the perception of their images.
Keywords: William Shakespeare, Michael Nyman, the play The Tempest, the opera Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, interpretation, postcolonialism, deconstruction, depersonalizationFull Text:
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.56620/RM.2024.4.041-054
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