Shapinskaya Ekaterina Nikolaevna,

Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, 

Director of Education in the sphere of Culture, 

Russian Institute of Cultural Research. 

e-mail: reenash@mail.ru

 

Dobrenkova Olga Panteleevna

Chief Structural Engineer, Aerodinamika LLC 

e-mail: dobrenkova-olga@yandex.ru

 

 

Dialog about The Marriage of Figaro:

problem of power and resistance in Beaumarchais’s play and Mozart’s opera:

interpretation in different contexts

 

 

Abstract: The authors discuss the problem  of power relations and their representations depending on historic and cultural context. In liminal periods traditional binarisms, such as "Power/Resistance", "Dominance/Subjugation" change their meanings up to reversal of the opposition. In postmodern culture, with its tendency to deconstruction of  binary oppositions, counterposing of these concepts is dispersed in the general fragmented space of "postculture", with its absence of a clear value-system and hierarchical order of cultural phenomena. As an illustration the analysis of Beaumarche's  "The Marriage of Figaro" and Mozart's opera written on its plot has been carried out. The authors examine several productions of the opera in which the policy of representation of power relations is most manifest as well as the semantic shift in interpretation of the characters and the plot depending on cultural dominants of  the epoch and on subject position of producers and performers.

 

Key words: Power, dominance, subjugation, interpretation, representation, opposition, binarism, culture, tradition, context, liminality, deconstruction