Everything You Wanted and Didn’t Want to Know about Mediaopera: A Cryptophonic Memoir

If the compositional method for the so-called mediaopera reaches back to the conceptionalism of the 1990s and, with it, the invention of „cryptophonics,“ this memoir details the creation of Iraida Yusupova‘s five media operas. Starting with Einstein & Margarita in 2003 and ending with The Alphabet from 2024, they involve the development – in parallel, yet unified – of sounds and images as spearate staves in a total score that is not fully written. As each line develops over time, their vertical connections are created in the performance which serves as a definitive staging and ulimate referent for the mediaopera as a work. This distinguishes Yusupova‘s mediaoperas from animated YouTube opera stagings or the use of video-projections on the opera stage. If, according to the poet Tutchev, „the pronounced thought is a lie,“ any meaning at all can be encrypted in different systems of signs. But even in the right musical key the encrypted meanings cannot be deciphered – allowing for a conversation between the living and the dead, especially the footage of Yusupova deceased husband and collaborator, filmmaker Alexander Dolgin, and herself.