Women Die in Opera

Catalog description

Opera has been an elite form of musical entertainment in Western culture since the seventeenth century. Even though most famous lead roles in opera are for women, operas until the twentieth century have been predominantly written by men librettists and composers. They capture and prescribe the predominant values of modern Western patriarchy. In this course, we watch and listen to operas from 1600 to the present time. We pair the viewings with readings to answer the question: why do women so frequently die (and lie) in opera?