GERST 6420

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  • Schedule of Classes - January 19, 2016 6:14PM EST
  • Course Catalog - January 19, 2016 6:21PM EST

GERST 6420
Operatic States: Imagining Community in Music Drama

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This seminar will explore how states and communities are represented in opera from the eighteenth century to the end of World War II.  Discussions will begin with representations of the absolutist state in baroque opera, examining its preoccupation with paradigms of good and bad rulership before turning to attempts in operas such as Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio to imagine implications of the absolutist legacy for civil society and the emerging bureaucratic state.  Other sessions will be devoted to nineteenth-century opera, focusing on responses to the French Revolution and the changing role of the masses and "the people" (Grand opéra, Wagner), before turning to the years immediately before and during World War II, ranging from the Zeitoper of the 1920s to alternative musical universes (Strauss) or Viktor Ullmann's König von Atlantis, composed in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

When Offered Fall.

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Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session.  Combined with: MUSIC 7223

  • 4 Credits Stdnt Opt

  • 16330 GERST 6420   SEM 101

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