LARTS 348 — Opera: Music and the Visual Arts

3 credits
Spring
Greta Berman

This team-taught course will focus on a selection of operas, exploring a few of the many connections between that art form and the visual arts. Among the operas we will examine are Monteverdi’s Orfeo, one or two of Handel’s numerous works, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, as well as operas by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Richard Strauss’s Salome, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler — unique in that the composer based it on the life and work of the 16th-century German painter, Mathias Grünewald — all have special relevance to visual art. We will look at these through a variety of approaches: thematic as well as stylistic. Some of the painters whose work corresponds to the composers include Nicolas Poussin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.