The Minnesota Opera

Classes for the 2008-2009 season will be announced this summer!

Previous 2007-2008 classes:

A Masked Ball

Wednesday, September 19, 2007, 7:00-9:00 pm
The Minnesota Opera Center

The Masked Ball of Giuseppe Verdi began life in the court of Gustav III of Sweden and ended in colonial Boston. Hear Bel Canto scholar Philip Gossett explore its complex history (with many musical examples on the piano), and explain why The Masked Ball remains one of Verdi's greatest and--at the same time--most frustrating operas, thanks to the intervention of the Roman censors.

Philip Gossett is one of the world's foremost experts on opera. A music historian, Gossett specializes in 19th-century Italian opera, specifically the works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. Author of two books on Donizetti and of the recent Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Gossett serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi and of The Critical Edition of the Works of Gioachino Rossini.

Among the operas he himself has edited or co-edited are Rossini's Tancredi, Ermione and Semiramide. He is currently working on Verdi's La forza del Destino. In 1998 the Italian government awarded him its highest civilian honor, Cavaliere di Gran Croce. He most recently won the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, an honor that carries with it a prize of $1.5 million. Early in 2004, Newsday wrote of Gossett that "some encomiasts claim that soprano Maria Callas did as much for Italian opera as Toscanini or Verdi. Musicologist Philip Gossett arguably has done as much for Italian opera as any of those geniuses."

The Italian Girl in Algiers

Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 7:00-9:00 pm
The Minnesota Opera Center

Rossini's fizzing Italian buffo masterpieces inhabit a sound world that is unique, and instantly recognizable. Bill Lutes will explore the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian Girl in Algiers, and the ways in which the composer creates his delightful brand of comedy through his virtuoso writing for the voice; his orchestration, and his endlessly inventive melodic and rhythmic ideas. The talk will be illustrated with classic recordings of the opera, and well as video excerpts.

Bill Lutes is Artist-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin/Madison where he serves as vocal coach for the University Opera.. As pianist he has performed nationally as soloist and collaborative musician and maintains an independent piano and vocal coaching studio in Madison. His piano students have won numerous prestigious competitions and awards..

He frequently collaborates with his pianist/singer wife, Martha Fischer, in concerts of the piano duet and two-piano literature and in their Gilbert and Sullivan revue ‘Innocent Merriment". Mr. Lutes has performed in and directed most of the G&S operettas.

Mr. Lutes served as Music Director of the NPR News and Classical Music Network of Wisconsin Public Radio where he established award-winning educational programs. He is a popular lecturer on music, and has presented music appreciation courses for the Smithsonian Institution's Resident Associates Program and has been heard on the airwaves as a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Quiz.

Romeo and Juliet

Monday, January 14, 2008, 7:00-9:00 pm
The Minnesota Opera Center

Roméo et Juliette: from a Chinese double-agent's production to the Parisian suburbs

It has long been the opinion of master coach, Mary Dibbern, that Roméo et Juliette is Gounod's masterpiece, although his Faust has typically garnered more attention. This lecture will reveal some of Ms. Dibbern's personal experiences with the opera, including the adventures of the first French-language production in China (for which she was the vocal coach), as well as her correspondence with Gounod's great-grandson, Jean-Pierre Gounod, and her meetings with François Davin, the great-great-great grandson.

The American pianist Mary Dibbern is internationally known as a specialist in the field of vocal accompaniment. Her activities include opera coaching, recitals, recordings, master classes at the University level, Young Artists Program teaching, television and radio appearances in Europe, the United States and Asia. She is the author of The Tales of Hoffmann: Performance Guide and Carmen: Performance Guide for Pendragon Press, as well as Interpreting the Songs of Jacques Leguerney: A Guide for Study and Performance in collaboration with Carol Kimball and Patrick Choukroun. Her fourth book, Faust/Roméo et Juliette: Performance Guide was recently published in 2006.

The Fortunes of King Croesus

Monday, February 18, 2008, 7:00-9:00 pm
The Minnesota Opera Center

Explore the historical and musical contexts surrounding what was, in the early eighteenth century, one of the best known operas by Hamburg composer Reinhard Keiser-a composer little known today but eulogized as "the greatest opera composer in the world" in the years and decades after his death. The Fortunes of King Croesus enacts the story of the fortunes of King Croesus-the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia who learns, almost too late, that money cannot buy happiness. This moralistic subject was a favorite artistic subject in northern Germany and the Netherlands, and we'll look at some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German and Dutch paintings and dramatic works on the subject. Since during his lifetime Keiser was singled out for particular praise for his handling of characterization, the class will focus on this aspect of the opera, looking at the music of the principal characters in Croesus to uncover how their arias not only shed light on an early eighteenth-century understanding of the emotions, but help uncover layers of meaning in the work.

Kelley Harness' recent scholarly work concentrates on the interrelationships between music, theatrical imagery, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century Italy. Her work relies on musical analysis to reveal a composition's allegorical messages and combines archival research and interpretive models from literary criticism, art history, and anthropology; her teaching reflects this interdisciplinary approach. Harness wants her students to master various tools in order to penetrate the expressive and intellectual layers of specific musical works. She is the author of Echoes of Women's Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles in journals and collections of essays. Her current research focuses on references to musical performance in 16th- and 17th-century Italian plays.
In 1994, she won the American Musicological Society's Paul A. Pisk Prize, and in 1991, she received a Fulbright Dissertation Grant for research in Italy. She is the recipient of publication subvention awards from the American Musicological Society and the Newberry Library.

Rusalka

Monday, March 31, 2008, 7:00-9:00 pm
The Minnesota Opera Center

Antonín Dvořák’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka is the most frequently performed Czech opera in the world today. The story of a water sprite who renounces her divinity in order to experience love with a mortal prince, Rusalka offers lessons about the pain and uncertainty that can befall even the most committed relationships. Once jealous of the fufillment enjoyed by human lovers, the water sprite learns from her own tragic love affair that it is best not to disturb natural order. Dvořák drew on Czech national styles as well as the mainstream German romantic traditions of his day to produce in Rusalka a ravishingly beautiful array of passion, sentiment, and operatic spectacle that fully justifies the international reputation it has enjoyed in recent decades. Join us as we fill out the Dvořák picture a bit as well as to introduce Rusalka and to talk about the character and the sources of the composer's operatic language.

Daniel E. Freeman has taught music history at the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California, and the University of Minnesota, where he now holds a position as lecturer. He also offers annual lecture series in music history at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A specialist in eighteenth-century European music, he is the author of two books and numerous scholarly essays. His third book, Mozart in Prague, is in preparation.

Join Our Email List

Enhance your 2007-2008 opera-going experience through our

Adult Education Classes.