The Worlds of Opera

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will explore the history of opera, with a particular focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition to examining opera's changing forms, genres, and musical conventions, we will explore practices of production, performance, and opera-going. Most of all, we will ask how opera, with its characteristic reliance on spectacle and heightened emotion, casts light on some central concerns: issues of power and nation; identity and tradition; empire and otherness; but also of feeling, sincerity, and the possibility of communication. Throughout, we will be attentive to the ways particular operas engaged with the societies that produced them, but we will also be concerned with the contemporary life of these works, exploring issues raised by their staging for modern audiences and their mediation by film, recordings, and digital media. Weekly assignments will include reading and listening/viewing (including occasional screenings or performances). Course requirements will include papers and shorter writing assignments.