A historical and cultural survey course of a select genre of vocal music, such as opera, song, musical theater, and choral music. Topics vary by semester and may satisfy different Core requirements.
Opera and Immigrant Culture in Turn-of-the-Century America
For most of the nineteenth century, opera in America was a popular form of entertainment consumed by all social classes. But by the late 1800s, opera’s reputation for being an exclusive and elite art form began to crystallize, enshrined in the establishment of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1883. Over the next two decades, the connection between culture and social status became ever stronger as waves of immigration of predominantly Italians and Eastern European Jews radically changed the fabric of American society. This course introduces students to opera through an exploration of how these different ethnic and social groups experienced the genre in America. By examining some of the most famous Italian, French, and German operas performed during the turn-of-the-century period, we consider how opera functioned in these mostly distinct yet also overlapping cultural spheres. What meanings and significance did the genre have for these different groups? What pieces were performed, by whom, in what languages, and in what cities and venues? How much did tickets cost? Studying a range of primary sources as well as scholarship by musicologists, historians, sociologists, and theater scholars will introduce students to opera’s presence in multiple contexts during the early twentieth century: mainstream American, German immigrant, Italian immigrant, and Yiddish-speaking/Jewish immigrant. In doing so, the course traces the history of the tension between opera’s status as high and popular culture in America (itself also an immigrant story) and its connections to the operetta and Tin Pan Alley song. By the end of the course, students will have gained a nuanced understanding of the musical and social factors shaping the production and consumption of European opera in America circa 1900, the relationship between mainstream and immigrant culture in the realm of opera, and they will be equipped to consider the broader implications of questions of popularity and exclusivity in American musical culture, past and present. This course highlights the idea that opera, like any art form, is not a fixed entity but rather an ever-changing and multifaceted reflection of a society’s cultural and social concerns. Additional Core Requirement Met: U.S. Diversity.
Opera
Since its inception in late 16th-century Florence as a humanistic reimagining of Greek tragedy, opera has served as a catalyst for social and political change. The opera-loving agents advocating for this change have been diverse: philosophers (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kwame Anthony Appiah), writers (Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison), and activists (Theodor Herzl, W. E. B. Dubois, Martin Luther King), among many others, including the late jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose legal career was dedicated to advocating for gender equality and women's rights. This iteration of this history-of-opera course will focus on the five operas that Justice Ginsburg wanted people to know: Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi's Otello, Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West, and Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. In the first half of the course we will survey the history of opera in Europe, up to and including the two Mozart operas, which premiered in 1786 and 1787. We will study all five operas with attention to their plots' legal and gender relations. Students will learn opera's forms and styles and read primary documents written as responses to individual operas and opera writ large, all with the goal of understanding these operas' political, philosophical, and cultural contexts as well as their messages for us today. No prior musical experience is required. Additional Core Requirement: Regional Focus.