Tragedy and Early Modern Opera

About this course:

The early modern artists’ ability to masterfully rework traditions of classical and neoclassical tragedy for the operatic stage has produced a number of early European operas, which continue to stand the test of time. In this course, we view selected operas from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing our study on the characteristic features of tragedy and its integration. The selected operas include Peri’s Euridice, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Cavalli’s Giasone, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Charpentier’s Médée, Handel’s Rinaldo, and Rameau and Pellegrin's Hippolyte et Aricie. We also consider other short musical examples to better our understanding of the resulting genre.