Post-Opera and Postdramatic Music Theatre

Jelena Novak Contextualizing Opera in a Post-dramatic context: Differences and Repetitions

Postdramatic music theatre is a subspecies of postdramatic theatre in which verbal texts should be sung and not spoken. Here we come to a definition of the term music theatre. According to Patrice Pavis, music theatre is
[a] contemporary form of theatre (to be distinguished from opera, operetta and musical comedy) [that] endeavors to bring together text, music and visual staging without integrating them, merging them, or reducing them to a common denominator (as in Wagnerian opera), and without distancing them from one another (as in the didactic operas of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht).17
The term postdramatic music theatre differs from postopera in its intention to deconstruct the institution of theatre, and not that of opera.

Postoperatic Characteristics
Through the history of opera most librettos possessed some form of dramatic origin or structure. In this respect, most traditional operas could be provisionally termed ‘dramatic operas’. Einstein on the Beach by Glass/Wilson was a turning point in that respect and could serve as a paradigmatic example of postopera.
The characteristics of postopera are as follows:

• There is no domination of one operatic text over the others
• Differing from the works of postdramatic music theatre, postopera primarily questions, problematizes, and redefines the institution of opera, and not theatre
• The impossibility of any unity of operatic texts is shown. Texts exists in a rhizome-like relationship. Operatic works whose texts are not in a subordinated hierarchy have abandoned the search for a unity of texts which had featured throughout the history of opera.