In Search for a Genuine Reality: The Specificity of Genre and Dramaturgy in Per Nørgård’s opera Siddharta

Abstract

The article focuses on the peculiarities of genre and dramaturgy of the opera Siddharta (1974‒1979, revised 1984, libretto by Ole Sarvig) by Danish composer Per Nørgård. Its plotline is based on the story of young Buddha, his birth, growing up and encounter with human sufferings, from which the prince had been artificially shielded by his father. The author of the article connects the opera’s singularity of genre with its character of modulation from a mystery to a drama, which is confirmed by the changes occurring in the libretto’s lexical structure, in the chronotope of the composition, which reflects consistently the various models of time (the mythological, the artistic, and the psychological), in the choice of different opera forms for each act, and in the dramaturgical process directed from the outward eventful plane to the inward psychological dimension. The article reveals the compositional strategies that helped Nørgård manifest the conflict between the genuine and the inauthentic world on a musical level: the rhythmic transformation and the metric reaccentuation of the themes, the combination of the overtone and the undertone pitch sets, the rejection of the hierarchical system at the end of Act III, symbolizing the main protagonist’s estrangement from the world of his past. In connection with the artistic crisis experienced by Nørgård after he composed Siddharta, the author presumes that the opera may be interpreted as a self-reflection of artistic activity.