Music and Time Annotation << Back A Witness to the Radical Breakdown of Human Destinies. To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Z. Paliashvili A.I. Demchenko In the opera «Abesalom and Eteri» much is focused on musical classics, and the search for the time of the creation of this work is associated with elegiac motifs, the portrayal of images of the ideal, as well as contacts with verizm and neoclassicism. The specific weight of clearly expressed modern stylistics in «Abesalom and Eteri» is small, so it is often more legitimate to talk about transitional stylistic formations, as if balancing between classical and new music. We find a different style balance in the opera «Daisi». With all the continuity of its artistic language, it almost entirely belongs to the new time. The changed reality of the critical time was most of all answered in the «Daisi» by the description of a new folk character – hence the roll calls with the current of music of the early twentieth century, which in its various shades received the designations «pagan», «barbarian», «scythian». The second problem of the comparative analysis of the two operas of Paliashvili is connected with a radical shift in the attitude of the world, which occurred in the movement from the 1910s to the first half of the 1920s. The essence of the opera «Abesalom and Eteri» is to affirm the light, beauty and harmony of being, and the meaning of the events tak-ing place in the opera «Daisi» is to reflect the discord of life, which makes this opera a pronounced drama of strong passions. This implies the general intensity of the atmosphere, the transmission of acute pain sensations and the most intense conflict, brought to the verge of tragic hopelessness. If we trust the intuition of the composer, who made such a sharp shift in his evolution from the first opera to the second, we will have to state the unsettled human destinies and the disharmony of life, which was sharply exposed by the beginning of the 1920s, in which the grandiose historical scrapping of the first post-october years found its indirect reflection. Keywords: Paliashvili’s operas, from the harmony of being to a pronounced conflict. Pp. 12-17.