September 3: Introduction
Posted by Charles T. Downey at 9:09 AM |
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Welcome to this course on Opera in the Twentieth Century at The Catholic University of America. We will be covering a range of modern operas in class, and I hope that we can use this Weblog to continue our presentation and discussion of the works we study during this semester. You are all invited to post your findings, your questions, your answers, and anything else that you find interesting related to our topic. You can use the Comments function to respond to another student's post, or you may choose to write a complete post instead.
The matters that we discussed in our first class were:
Welcome to this course on Opera in the Twentieth Century at The Catholic University of America. We will be covering a range of modern operas in class, and I hope that we can use this Weblog to continue our presentation and discussion of the works we study during this semester. You are all invited to post your findings, your questions, your answers, and anything else that you find interesting related to our topic. You can use the Comments function to respond to another student's post, or you may choose to write a complete post instead.
The matters that we discussed in our first class were:
- What is an opera? What are the qualities that all operas have in common that allow us to distinguish them from other types of music?
- What are the conventions that opera composers of the 20th century inherited from the past, to reject or re-embrace?
- What happened to the business of opera and the question of patronage in the 20th century?
- Why have some 20th-century operas become accepted as part of the operatic canon? How does the idea of an operatic canon affect the creation of new works?
- What influence did the ideas of Richard Wagner have on operas created after him?
- What are the traditional literary sources of opera? What has happened to the process of choosing and creating opera librettos in the 20th century?
