Lévi-Strauss and the Opera
LEVI-STRAUSS AND THE OPERA

Author(s): Vlado Kotnik
Subject(s): Music, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure
Published by: Srpski genealoški centar
Keywords: Lévi-Strauss; structural reading of opera; metapho-rical "composing"; Mythologiques; opera as myth and metaphor.
Summary/Abstract: This paper is dedicated to Claude Lévi-Strauss and his structural reading of opera as metaphorical 'composing' of an anthropological grand opera, materialized in the four-volume study of Mythologiques, which refers to Wagner s tetralogy of The Ring. He created a type of comparative view of the fun-ction and structure of myth schemes in Amerindian culture and the orchestral scores of Wagner s operas, and implicitly signalled that European music, with its eminent representation opera has had the same value or similar symbolic position in the mind and life of a contemporary European that myth has had in the savage mind . Through this, he can lead us to the understanding of opera as myth and metaphor. However, the paper extends the discussion on Lévi-Strauss to a broader historical picture of the relationship between opera and mythology as two symbolic systems of European culture

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