The Mozart phenomenon in the Postmodern interior

This article examines Michael Nyman’s 1991 television opera Letters, Riddles, and Writs, created in collaboration with Jeremy Newson and Pat Gavin to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death. It was part of the BBC’s experimental project Not Mozart, which reflected the values of postmodern culture. The libretto of the opera was based on documentary sources—fragments of Mozart’s letters and his “carnival” riddles. This article examines the artistic concept of the work, which was shaped by two central ideas. The first, inspired by the psychoanalytic research of American musicologist Maynard Solomon, concerned Mozart’s relationship with his father. The second engages with issues of creative self-reflection, plagiarism, and the place of classical music in a multicultural context. Special attention in the article is paid to the compositional features of the opera and Nyman’s methods of treating borrowed musical material, which were based on the principle of deconstruction. The study concludes that the British composer invests the opera genre with the qualities of a metacomposition, transforming it simultaneously into both a psychological exploration of the artist’s identity and a form of artistic self-diagnosis. By breaking some stereotypes and creating others, Nyman emphasizes the relative nature of our ideas about Mozart and the fact that they are shaped by cultural context. Keywords: musical theater of the 20th century, Michael Nyman, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leopold Mozart, postmodernism, deconstruction, plagiarism

Ethnomusicology · Identity (music) · MOZART · Musical · Musicology · Opera · Phenomenon · Postmodernism · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Theater, Performance, and Music History