MUSI 315 - A Song of Love and Death: Opera in History

This course provides a critical and historical introduction to opera from the early eighteenth century to the present. No background in music is required: the course is meant to serve students wanting a first experience with the art form as well as those who come with some experience and wish to deepen their engagement. If you’ve ever been curious about what all the fuss is about opera, this course is for you! We will occasionally look at musical scores, but students without skills in reading Western musical notation may succeed in the course by focusing on other aspects of opera (e.g. the text of the opera and its source material, performance and staging, critical reception history) in their written work. Along with the close study of individual operas on a variety of subjects–myth and legend, politics and religion, the bourgeois center and its margins–we will read critical commentary that contextualizes these artworks within the history of ideas. We will be interested above all in the ways in which opera tells us what it sounds like, and feels like, to be human. Alternate years. (4 Credits)