Specific Features of Work with the Poetic Text in the Post-Opera (by the Example of Tan Dun’s Opera Marco Polo)

Abstract

Abstract. The opera repertoire by John Adams, Philip Glass, Tan Dun, Meredith Monk and
Steve Reich is comprised of works that are difficult to attribute to any known variety of academic
opera. Non-linear methods of dramatic development, the principles of unfolding a poetic text
aimed at destroying the narrative, along with new compositional patterns – these are all striking
distinctive features of such compositions, and they present the possibility of perceiving the genre
of opera from a new perspective. After all, the issue of interaction between music and drama, which
has become the cornerstone for numerous opera reformations, has lost its relevance in the works of
the aforementioned composers.
In Russian musicology, these issues have remained practically entirely unstudied. A theoretical
platform necessary for understanding the new aesthetics of opera may be found in the concepts of
Hans Thiess Lehmann, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Elena Novak. By explaining the theatrical and musical
theater performances from the angle of manifesting in them the principles of post-dramatic theater,
they present the possibility of labeling the examined innovative works as post-operas. Post-opera
demonstrates the specific features of the genre’s functioning in the conditions of a postmodern
culture, in which opera acquires particular aesthetic properties that are not characteristic of it.
The author of the article examines in detail the specificity of working with the poetic texts and the
peculiarities of reading the literary source, as shown by the example of the libretto of Tan Dun’s
one-act opera Marco Polo. The focus is on the principle of creating semantic breaks and methods
of collage, segmentation and leveling of the communicative function of words. As a result of this
research, the author comes to the conclusion that a disruption of the means of unfolding the poetic
text in the libretto and an alteration of its function of creating a synthetic whole become necessary
in order to create a new form of opera performance – the show-performance. The distinctive feature
of the latter is the strengthening of the role of the audience member in creating the semantic field
of the composition.

Keywords: post-opera, а new form of performance in modern opera, the function of the poetic
text