Opera: Research as Rehearsal
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Interesting opera is created not just by memorizing a score and mindlessly practicing and repeating it. Thoughtful research is also a form of rehearsal. Performance can be enhanced and understanding deepened by studying an opera’s literary sources, mining its historical context, viewing related artworks, and studying its production history. In other words, doing the work of a dramaturge. Every semester in which it is offered, “Research as Rehearsal” will take as its subject an opera currently being rehearsed by the Peabody Opera Theatre Program. This year we will focus on Handel’s Semele, scheduled for performance in March. We will read such texts as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a literary source for the opera) and excerpts from Euripides’ Bacchae (since Semele is the mother of Dionysus). We will study paintings like Gustav Moreau’s Jupiter et Sémélé and Peter Paul Rubens’ Death of Semele. Since the performance will be staged in a 1920s style, we will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and watch film versions of the novel. We will also investigate the ways in which this opera’s origins in a pagan Greek myth affected its first London reception during the period of Lent and how that in turn affected future rewrites of the opera. Open to Graduates and Undergraduates.
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