The original multimedia genre, as Richard Wagner put it, or indeed a fusional artistic form, opera is a complex semiotic system, that lives from transposition. In fact, the musical and the linguistic texts are semiotically expounded in the act of performance, with the so-called performance arts (stagecraft, acting, dance and singing) recreating the operatic system anew. This paper aims to study the operatic system as a mode of intersemiotic translation, according to Roman Jakobson's definition, focusing further on the Portuguese productions of Richard Strauss' and Hugo von Hofmannstahl's Ariadne auf Naxos, and viewing them as priviliged examples of the changes in sociocommunicational behaviour.