Contemporary opera and the failure of language

Author(s): Bauer, A | Abstract: Opera after 1945 largely retreated from the challenge of modernism. A survey of notable post-war music theatre locates language and its vexed relation to music as the central concern of a true modernist operatic aesthetic. I discuss the relations that bind music, philosophy and language before analyzing five contemporary operas: Gyorgy Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Claude Vivier’s Prologue pour Marco Polo, Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici and David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Each opera poses a unique challenge to the crisis of representational language, and its relation to truth, the law, and the ethics of the sensual.