Sergei Prokofiev Opera House: a cycle of binary macrostructures

Abstract

   The S. Prokofiev Theater is today considered one of the pinnacles of the world musical theater of the 20th century. This article is devoted to the opera theater of S. Prokofiev and its philosophical overtones. It is important to understand the features of the formation and development of such a theater as a whole, to comprehend the design of the Prokofiev theater as a system of separate theatrical works in the creative mind of the author. The logic of the composer’s theatrical creativity, which in a peculiar way refracted the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, required that each new work of this genre be created in contrast with the previous one. As a result, the entire array of Prokofiev’s operas appears in the form of a system of philosophical antinomies embodied in the form of a cycle of opera dyads. Thus, Prokofiev managed to present in the form of binary macrostructures of his musical theater the inconsistency of the surrounding reality and the insolubility of ideological disputes about it, which are formed as a set of “theses” and “antitheses” that are not subject to synthesis. Considering the cycle of Prokofiev’s operas as a system of semantic antinomies makes it possible to present the corpus of his musical and theatrical works as a single text (hypertext) – in all the variety of intertextual connections and philosophical overtones.