Drawing on Schoenberg's concept of dissolution — as the process of letting go as quickly as possible of everything characteristic in motivic behavior to allow tensions to ebb — this paper aims to expand the concepts applicability to contemporary opera and its dramatic meaning. It uses the concept as an analytical tool to illuminate both the music and drama of the Cheshire Cat in Unsuk Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland (2007). In Scenes 4 and 6, the Cat flaunts a flexible body which continually appears and disappears, dizzying and confusing the other characters. His music is correspondingly slippery, gradually shedding its initial motivic form and shifting freely among Sprechstimme, speech, and portamento singing. I argue that, ironically, dissolution serves to clarify the logic of his ontological presence.

While Schoenberg's concept of motivic dissolution demonstrably captures the Cats essential presence-in-instability, its dramatic effect here is quite the opposite of Schoenberg's. Instead of releasing tension, the ultimate dissolution of the Cats motivic specificity — a form of musical physicality — winds the tension ever higher, leading to the collapse of the Queens Croquet Ground into sheer bedlam. This may be understood as one of the many ironic outcomes experienced within the fractured yet fantastically functioning mechanism of Wonderland.