ABSTRACT
Because opera involves drama, it goes beyond self-reflexive sound structures and relates music to narrative systems and their inherent logic. The self-reflexive repetitive procedures that those composers previously used now needed to be reworked in order to serve the representational demands of opera. This reworking coincides with the abandonment of modernism, and also with the post-dramatic orientation in the theatre about which Hans-Thies Lehmann has written.1 Thus the transition that Glass,
1 Lehmann’s book was originally published in German as Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt, 1999). I use its English translation, published as Hans-Thies Lehmann, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Postdramatic Theatre (New York, 2006). Since this translation is abridged, I also use a Serbian/Croatian translation of a complete version of the German original: Hans-Thies Lehmann, trans. Kiril Miladinov, Postdramsko Kazalište (Zagreb and Belgrade, 2004).
