In the 50's, 60's, the opera goes through a deep crisis. While Pierre Boulez calls to "blow up opera houses", more and more composers then devote themselves to defining a new genre by its theme, its dramaturgy, its musical writing, its visual dimension. and which is more like musical theater. The composers make audacious re-readings of the myths of antiquity. They intend to deliver a philosophical and political message. Contemporary opera was therefore built from new rules of composition.

Furthermore, postmodernism is an artistic movement which is said to be born in the sixties and has been first regarded as a reaction against modernism. What composers of the postmodernity contest in the modern aesthetics is the exclusiveness of innovation to the detriment of tradition. Postmodern opera aims at reintegrating tradition into modernity, giving birth to a kind of hybrid compositions. Its modernity should result from the stitch between different pieces, either borrowed or inspired like in The great Macabre of G. Ligeti.

   Postmodern compositions wrest upon a specific law of composition which could be assimilated  as G. Genette qualified to a "palimpsest". The term of palimpsest is defined as a parchment that has been written upon or inscribed two or three times, the previous texts having been imperfectly erased or remaining, therefore still visible.

 To begin with, we shall outline the general features of the postmodern operas: how structure, style and function work together. Contrary to the modern composers and for example those who represented the artistic movement of the concrete music whose motto was to innogurate a fundamentally innovative mode of writing, composers of the postmodernity intend to reunify tradition and modernism. To a certain extent, they succeed in creating a new aesthetics by integrating previous creations. From this intertextuality stems a sort of opera with several narrative voices exposing various superpositions. The opera of the twentieth century appears so as a place of permanent questioning of the criteria that defined its traditional form.

Writing becomes a mosaic of quotations. For example, Prometeo,  opera written by Luigi Nono between 1981 and 1984 refers to four compositions from the past:

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• The Missa di dadi by J. Desprez
• The First Symphony of Malher
• from Schumann
• The scale of the Ave Maria of the quattro pezzi sacri of Verdi.

G. Ligeti parodically uses the Beethoven's 9th symphony as well as Scott Joplin's rag time in The great Macabre.

Alfred, opera written in 1995 by Franco Donatoni refers to extracts from Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini. In 1990, John Cage likewise uses truncated quotations in Europeras. There is a quotation 's phenomenon with the practice of intertextuality. 

The composition appears as the place of an exchange between fragments of statements that it redistributes to build a new score from previous compositions. That is called the Dialogism. The dialogism involves as a matter of fact polyphony. There is an exchange, a dialogue between different compositions in the new composition which is the sum of all the voices and all the previous compositions.

G. Ligeti, L. Nono, P. Dusapin and L. Berio borrow stylistic and formal processes of the past.
Nono uses in Prometeo the isoryhtmy of the M-Age, the canonical techniques of the Franco-Flemish Renaissance and Venetian polychorality in the arrangement of instrumental groups and soloists.
Dusapin uses in Medeamaterial the forms of baroque music borrowed from dances. He uses the passacaglia, the metallic sounds of the harpsichord, the old modes to translate different affects. It includes in its score a page of characterology, expressions of faces drawn from books of the Baroque period. He uses a baroque temperament and micro-intervals. He is interested in the theory of affects.

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What seems to be also characteristic of the Postmodern movement is its inclination to parody. G. Ligeti practices the parodic opera and a tendency to black humour. Psychological scenes didn't exist any more. The Composers create archetypal characters, presented in a joking attitude which turns seriousness into derision. The comic effect precisely stems from this particular meaning of  the blend of styles as well as the blend of aspects. P. Manoury inserts so rock episodes in his opera 60th parallel  as well as L. Andriessen in his opera De materie.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, postmodern composers envision their era no longer under the sign of dissent but the reconciliation of styles, eras and genres. In a critical reading of his opera, called 60th parallel Philippe Manoury asserts that opera creation today has "one foot in the tradition and another in the experimentation". It thus defines between other terms postmodern opera.

                                                                                         

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