The opera “The Children of Rosenthal” by Vladimir Sorokin and Leonid Desyatnikov: deconstruction of the genre

The aim of the study is to identify the deep musical-conceptual plot of L. A. Desyatnikov’s opera “The Children of Rosenthal”, a work that is based on a game with the model of a classical-romantic opera. The article uses the method of deconstruction to analyze the libretto and musical drama of the work, revealing hidden meanings that reflect both the stereotypes of the opera genre and their new, often grotesque interpretation. This is the first time that such an approach to studying the opera “The Children of Rosenthal”, allowing for a fundamentally new reading of genre stereotypes, has been used, which makes this research scientifically novel. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that at the level of the libretto, the genre types of the classic-romantic opera, textual quotations, quasi-quotations and allusions, the emblematic names of the composers who are the heroes of the opera, are reproduced. As a consequence, a kind of meta-libretto of the classic-romantic opera is formed within the libretto. At the level of musical drama, the play with style manifests itself in the use of tonal drama, musical quotations, allusions, and quote-allusions, as well as traditional opera forms. All borrowings and references in the play acquire new meanings, and a plot-concept is formed on top of the narrative plot. “The Children of Rosenthal” is conceived by the authors as an opera about opera, while the very model of the classical-romantic opera is destroyed in Desyatnikov’s opus.