“Meanwhile, Let’s Go Back in Time”: Allegory, Actuality, and History in Robert Ashley’s Television Opera Trilogy

Forged from bits and pieces of over 100 operas drawn from the standard repertory and arranged by chance procedures, carried out with the aid of a computer, the Europeras themselves might be taken as a sign of the transition from an anxiety-ridden modernism that would negate history to an irreverent postmodernism that would playfully cannibalize historical forms in the confidence that they belonged to a world irrevocably past4 Cage's title, which can be read as "your operas," indicates the pronounced national dimension in this narrative of the joint demise of opera and history.