Opera and “Director’s” Theatre of the 21st Century

Abstract

The article raises the issues of interaction between modern direction and the musical text of opera. Researches of foreign and domestic scientists in the fi eld of theatre studies and musicology allow analyzing a musical performance as an independent text, in which there is an interchange between different types of art. The author focuses on the opera as a dialogue between music and theater. The author proposes three main forms of the dialogue for consideration: the director and the composer, the director and the viewer, the director and the actor. The article expresses the opinion that, in the process of interaction between the director and the opera text, some myths appeared and started to impede the development of this process and to cause confl ict situations while analyzing the fi nal results. Among those kinds of myths, the author reckons the idea of director-conceptualist as the destroyer of the composer’s idea, the unconditional defi nition of this idea, and the so-called “reverse logic” of feeling and action in musical theater. Observing the functioning of each of these myths on concrete examples, the author comes to conclusion on the necessity to “debunk” them for further successful development of musical theater. From this position, the article analyzes fragments from operas by Russian and foreign composers and their stage impersonations. In the dialogue “director—viewer”, two main ways of the participants’ interaction are defi ned: the theater as a form of escapism and the theater as a “catalyst” of intelligence. The author emphasizes the need to have both the ways, so that the viewer should be able to choose. The author considers the relations between the director and the actor to be the most positive for the modern theatre, which led to the emergence of a new type of performer on the modern opera stage: singerartist, who fully owns the acting technique of “internal action”. The article concludes that there is an ambiguous, but rather perspective and positive situation in the modern musical theater, which determines further ways of the genre’s development.