OSHER AT TOWSON UNIVERSITY: PROPOSAL FOR WINTER/SPRING, 2027

VIDEO PREVIEW      ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS      CLASSES:  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6]  [7]  [8]

Opera, on the face of it, is a most unlikely medium—exotic characters singing about exaggerated emotions in a foreign language—but it manages not only to attract audiences but to recruit diehard fans as well. Why should normal well-balanced people like the rest of us even care? This course suggests some of the reasons that make the Traviatas, Carmens, and Bohèmes so perennially popular, and wonders whether those same reasons or related ones might be extended to less familiar fare. This course is both for those unsure about opera who just want to dip a toe in, and for those already hooked but curious to work out why.

Scroll down for proposed class topics. Dates and fuller descriptions will follow if and when the course is approved. When this happens, and as each session is prepared, the RESOURCES tab under its image will turn GOLD, directing you to a specific page for that class, with a printable handout and often other information as well. rb.

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Tosca gets her revenge on Scarpia	RESOURCES

Music has the power to bypass the mind and enter directly into the heart. Whether conveying the force of lust and revenge in Tosca or the surge of love in La bohème, the peak moments in the great operas—often no more than a single phrase—can set our pulses racing or our tears flowing. So forget those people who tell you that opera is an elite medium that requires careful study—the great composers can get to you regardless.

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A tender moment in Delibes' Lakmé	RESOURCES

Opera contains drama and tension, of course, but the great composers set these off against moments of heart-stopping beauty, as in the Flower Duet near the beginning of Delibes' Lakmé, the Humming Chorus in the middle of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, or the sublime Trio near the end of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier. Such moments have become popular in their own right, but they have a special function when heard as oases in the middle of a developing drama or a serene point of arrival at the end.

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Frederica Lombardi as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro	RESOURCES

People do not converse through song in real life, and most operas have melodramatic or fantastic plots. Yet, because of music's power to convey emotion directly, we tend to respond best when singers and directors find a connection between the fictional characters and people like ourselves. We may not all be Spanish aristocrats, like the Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, we may not all have cheating husbands, yet we can all feel the pain of her feelings of loneliness and despair in the aria "Porgi, Amor," the first thing we hear from her in the opera.

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The title scene in John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer	RESOURCES

Overtly political operas are relatively rate. But John Adams' Death of Klinghoffer came so close to current events that its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera sparked protests led by Mayor Giuliani himself. And there is a long list of other operas that deal with real-life issues such as Anti-Semitism. But even an ostensibly trivial comedy such as Mozart's Figaro or an epic like Wagner's Ring can resonate powerfully with modern concerns, given a director interested in making the connection and an audience open to something more than mere entertainment.

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Triumphal scene from the old Aïda at the Met	RESOURCES

Nineteenth-century Paris saw the invention of a special category, Grand Opera, for a kind of opera in which spectacle was the main point: multiple acts with elaborate scenery, special effects, huge choruses, and a prominent ballet; other nations soon followed. Although tastes—and budgets—have since changed, many of these works remain repertoire favorites, and audiences go expecting the kind of spectacle they cannot see anywhere else.

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Calixto Bieto's updated Carmen in Paris	RESOURCES

Driven partly by reduced resources, partly by reaction against the kind of spectacle mentioned above, a new generation of opera stage directors has sought new ways of staging the old repertoire standards. Especially in Europe, but increasingly in this country also, opera has become the place to go for the most innovative theatrical techniques, and the most provocative interpretations.

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Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea	RESOURCES

You might not think it seeing the poise a great diva on the stage, but opera depends on star singers tuned to the pitch of an Olympic athlete, and many of its arias are designed to display the prowess of the few performers able to master them. The most memorable productions I saw in my first decades of opera-going are inseparable from my awed memory of the artists who sang in them. While I no longer feel quite the same today, I can easily understand the millions of fans motivated as much by the desire to follow the career of a favorite star as by the actual works in which they appear.

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Kasper Bech Holten rehearsing Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House	RESOURCES

The core list of so-called "repertoire operas" is remarkably small, and not only do the same works crop up repeatedly in the seasons of different opera houses, the same productions may have several changes of cast over the course of their run. As a result, the same scene may have a quite different effect when performed by different singers, and even more so in the hands of different directors. Alas, I am no longer in a position to demonstrate this live, as I could in my first Osher classes, but I can still make the point by comparing videos. rb.

 
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