Оперное творчество Майкла Наймана: художественные идеи и принципы их музыкального воплощения

Abstract

The article makes a study of the artistic concept of several of Michael Nyman’s operas and the formation of their semantic space within the immanent musical structure of the text. It is noted that the composer’s works pertain to post-minimalist musical theater and are often based on documentary sources. Despite the variety of issues involved — cloning and scientific racism in Facing Goya, copyright issues in Letters, Riddles and Writs, a distorted perception of reality in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Love Counts, and differences of worldviews in the opera Man and Boy: Dada, — the metatheme of Nyman’s opera work is music itself and, more broadly, art and its transformative power. The article pays special attention to the composer’s work with “derived” material. The deconstruction technique is singled out as the leading artistic means, it is shown how it contributes to the identification of artistic meanings. Thus, the free recombination of the segments of Schumann’s song Ich grolle nicht leads to the effect of “erasing” the original, revealing the essence of Professor P’s illness in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The verticalization of the segments of a chorale by Bach in the opera Love Counts embodies the impossibility of building syntagmatic connections in Patsy’s mind. The elaboration of musical material by Mozart in Letters, Riddles and Writs reveals its inner kinship with minimalism, which makes the problem of plagiarism irrelevant. The collage of stylistically diverse musical material in the opera Man and Boy: Dada serves as an analogue of the concept Merz, developed by the artist Schwitters.