ABSTRACT This article builds on recent work that extends fictionality beyond narrative, exploring how that capacity operates within the hybrid form of opera. Drawing on Jonathan Culler’s literary-historical account of lyric and James Phelan’s rhetorical model, it argues that opera’s combination of music, language, and performance creates conditions in which lyric and narrative interact to shape representations of scientific thought. Analyses of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Hotel Pro Forma’s Tomorrow, in a Year (2009) reveal contrasting strategies. Glass’s opera resists narrativity almost entirely, using localized fictional cues within a predominantly lyrical structure to mirror the paradigm-shifting, conceptual shocks of Albert Einstein’s theories. Tomorrow, in a Year integrates lyric performance of Charles Darwin’s writings with weak narrativity and evolving musical complexity. This hybrid structure produces moments of localized fictionality within a predominantly nonfictional frame to explore biographical and planetary scales. By situating fictionality within lyric structures, this article offers a framework for situating fictionality within hybrid rhetorical modes across media.
Brian J. McAllister (Fri,) studied this question.