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Abstract: The authors of this article — the philologist and the musicologist — analyze the postmodern text of the opera libretto and its subsequent projection in the musical score of the opera. The purpose of this work is to offer for pupils of the philological class the material for reflection on the interaction of art forms in the contemporary cultural life. In the libretto of the opera “The Children of Rosenthal”, a classical European opera, a cinema, a radio, a drama theater and even an implicit image of a puppet theater are united. Desyatnikov follows the proposed literary storyline of the libretto wherein "clones" of Mozart, Tchaikovsky Musorgsky, Verdi and Wagner are present. The composer reproduces some elements of the musical styles of these authors in quite recognizable way. He is well aware of the specifics of musical theater as a kind of "cumulative artistic product". As a result, the opera performance becomes the embodiment of the concept of rhizome introduced by J. Deleuze to characterize the non-linear and structureless life-art relations of the modern world. The game world is created in the work with the help of the plot, language and musical resources. The palimpsest is considered as a conceptual metaphor that determines the conventionality and secondary reflections of Sorokin, aimed to another's literary and artistic world. On this basis, Desyatnikov creates a work marked by a postmodern artistic and aesthetic carnival. But music, full of quotes and stylistic allusions, creates another artistic reality, which, like the palimpsest, preserves, at least partially, the spiritual values of the past. The analysis of the opera "The Children of Rosenthal" gives an opportunity, on the example of the work of one of the most popular Russian authors, to acquaint pupils with the literature of postmodernism, to present the opera as a constantly renewing genre and to help pupils to form an active aesthetic position in relation to complex phenomena of contemporary art.