Postmodern Opera 101

Abstract

Reacting against traditional narrative strategies while engaging the dialectics embedded in both irony and nostalgia, postmodern aesthetics transform and subvert conventional models, transgressing the ideology behind musical conventions and appealing to a reconfiguration of normative conceptions. In this chapter, the author’s reading of Dennis Kam’s Opera 101 examines how the bifurcating narrative trajectories of the music and the libretto articulate a postmodern metanarrative that invite ironic and nostalgic interpretations. Within this work, nostalgia is anchored on intertextual references of firmly established operatic gestures, while irony is grounded in the dialectics of bifurcating narratives and supported by localized, surface-level indexical tropes. This chapter thus underscores that the postmodernist impulse in opera may be revealed by deploying analytical frameworks liberated from the traditional understanding of “narrative” and its associated normative aesthetics.