Opera as Text: Perspectives on Italian Music, Drama & Society

Catalog description

This seminar course presents an introduction to Italian opera as an art form, a cultural source for national identity, and a genre that combines dramatic action with musical structure and political expression. The course is divided in three major sections: Mythology, Literature, and Modern Life. These sections will provide the context of our investigation of compositional trends, sociological influences, and aesthetic tendencies in the history of Italian opera, from the birth of the genre to today. Rather than survey the history of opera from about 1600 to the present, the course will focus primarily on a limited number of major Italian works to be studied in class.