Anthony’s Death: Opera under the Condition of Žižek

Abstract

The paper attempts to trace the relevance of the work of Slavoj Žižek in the field of practical opera composition, taking as example the Greek contemporary opera Anthony’s Death, which dramatizes a multitude of Žižekian topics and concludes with a sung Žižek text. The paper argues that the tension between the dimensions of Meaning and Voice is constitutive of the genre of opera itself, and exhibits the strategies used by Anthony’s Death to thematize this disjunction. The work’s structure is then examined (a) as an attempt to artistically render several Žižekian topoi (especially the opposition of the Symbolic/Imaginary and the Real) and (b) from the point of view of the different uses it subjects Žižek’s text to. The vicissitudes of thought submitted to musical treatment are considered next, and it is argued that a “fall” from Meaning into Sound is inevitable when abstract thought is sung. Finally, the importance of Žižek’s work for contemporary opera is located on the level of operatic form, for which it is asserted that it has the ability to act as a potentially vivifying catalyst.