MUSI2651: Studies in the History of Opera

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• The module will engage with key intellectual issues attendant on the development of opera from the late Renaissance to the present day. Students will become familiar with canonical and non-canonical works, which will be considered in detail from a variety of perspectives: students will develop further the critical and analytical skills imparted in Historical Studies 1 and Analysis 1, bringing them to bear on new repertoire and more sophisticated tasks. Students will also engage with a number of recurring themes in operatic discourse and practice, and with issues that have animated recent opera scholarship. Students will learn to engage critically with secondary literature and form their own arguments.

• This module provides an overview of key developments in the history of opera which may include but are not limited to the 'invention' of opera, operatic reform movements, the rise of opera buffa, the disintegration of recitative-aria distinctions, 'Romantic' opera, the emergence of verismo, and opera and expressionism. Equally central, however, is the exploration of themes that cut across temporal and national divides: the operatic representation of gender, class, race, sexuality; text-music relations, opera and drama, and opera as 'multimedia'; the politics of opera; approaches to operatic staging and traditions of operatic direction and interpretation; opera's distributed agency eg. singers, impresarios, librettists, choreographers, etc; the relationship between opera and operatic discourse.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will be provided with an opportunity to deepen their understanding of opera as an art form and its evolving relation to social/cultural matrix from which it emerged, as well as to broaden their knowledge of core repertoire.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students will learn to apply appropriate methods of assessment from a broad range of critical standpoints, notably the historical, cultural and political, drawing especially on hermeneutic methodologies which seek to elucidate the relationships between artworks and their social/cultural context.

Key Skills:

• The ability to identify and conceptualise key issues in the study of opera, situate ideas in context, engage in critically informed argument and apply appropriate analytical methodologies.

• The module tends towards chronological presentation of operatic history, but also includes issue-based lectures that encourage the students to transfer ideas between repertoires and time periods.
• The seminars are alternately text-based, developing critical readings skills, or score-based, practising the close reading of operatic materials and multimedia.
• The students will be required to submit one summative essay on a topic of their choosing: this encourages independent thinking and creativity and is supported by individual tutorials.
• Formative exercises will be set in preparation for the summative exercises, and may include a guided literature review to develop the student's capacity to synthesise and critique secondary literature; oral presentations which develop academic presentation skills and give them an opportunity to test their ideas.

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