The Risks of Theater: Ethics and Music on the French and German Stage

Undergraduate / Graduate

For as long as there has been art, there have been social critics worried about its potential for negative moral effects on its audience, from Plato's banishment of the poets from his ideal city to conservative critics of Hollywood today. This course will examine such controversies in the context of theater, and will ask what role music plays in connection to spectators' affective, aesthetic, and ethical experiences and responses. Does adding music to theater, as in an opera, heighten moral risk to the spectator? Or, instead, does music make theater more capable of operating as a social good? How does music (instrumental and/or vocal) relate to spoken theater? What are the pleasures and purposes of music? We will explore these questions across a wide range of time periods, reading and/or watching works by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Racine, Boileau, Lully, Rameau, Rousseau, Goethe, Wagner and Brecht. In doing so, we will confront some of the (often strange and fascinating) criticisms that some observers have leveled at theater - as well as the ways in which playwrights and musicians have sought to redeem it.