Studies in the relationship of literature in English to the arts.

Invented in Renaissance Italy as a revival of classical Greek drama, opera became a major European art form, interacting dynamically with literary and philosophical genres across the long nineteenth century (the period we’ll be studying). “An exotic and irrational entertainment,” in Samuel Johnson's phrase, it retains a reputation for being the most artificial and extravagant of the arts, a gaudy backdrop for the social rituals of the rich and titled. In the spirit of the public university, our course seeks to liberate opera from its elite preserve and make it democratically available as a unique source of sensuous and intellectual enjoyment. Attending to opera’s hybrid, multimedia status, as a dramatic (and spectacular) as well as a musical form, we’ll consider six major works produced between the 1780s and the 1930s in relation to the literary genres and media they invoke (lyric, epic, comedy, tragedy, novel, film); to philosophical debates they generated; and/or to major models, sources, and subsequent adaptations. We will attend to questions of translation, not only across languages (especially vexed in the Russian-to-English case of Eugene Onegin) but also across genres and media – Pushkin's Onegin is a “novel in verse”; Tchaikovsky's, “lyric scenes in three acts.” If there’s an overarching theme or topic across our readings, it is opera’s staging of the relations between sex and power – contending fantasies of desire and renunciation, dominance and freedom – in an era of bourgeois ascendancy and the decline of old dynastic empires. Opera’s tutelary erotic demons, masculine and feminine, are Don Giovanni (at one end of our chronology) and Lulu (at the other) – indeed, our selection of works tells a story of the transference of charisma from the male to the female protagonist. Where Verdi’s Falstaff stages a comic redemption of Mozart’s hell-bound libertine through his defeat by feminine wiles, our other works exalt the operatic heroine in her struggle with the bonds of family and marriage (Lucia, Tatiana, Sieglinde, Brünnhilde …) We’ll study Don Giovanni (Da Ponte/Mozart) in relation to its Romantic reception and literary and philosophical revisions (from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kierkegaard and T.W. Adorno to Bernard Williams and Mladen Dolar); Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti) and its source, Walter Scott’s romantic historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor; Pushkin’s versus Tchaikovsky’s versions of Eugene Onegin; epic, tragedy, national mythology and the “total artwork” in Wagner’s Die Walküre, alongside Nietzsche’s pro- and anti-Wagner writings; Verdi’s Falstaff and other remediations of Shakespeare’s great comic character; Berg’s Lulu and the Weimar Republic-era forms of cabaret-opera (Brecht/Weil, The Threepenny Opera) and silent movie (G.W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box). Technical musical knowledge, or even prior acquaintance with opera, is not expected (let alone required); however, one of our tasks as a class will be figuring out how to talk seriously about the music in the absence of musicological expertise. You will be required to watch/listen to each of the operas (audio files and video streaming provided) as well as keep up with the literary, philosophical and critical readings.

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Requirements class fulfills