Operatic Contacts (Soc. Hum. 405)
Instructor: Arthur Groos
Fall 1999, T 10:05-12:05

Operatic practice in the late nineteenth century, a period of intense European contact with other nations, races, and cultures, frequently constructs narratives about these contacts that engage issues of national identity and ethnicity, racial and gender politics, and colonialism. This seminar begins with the interpretative challenges posed, then and now, by the cross-cultural politics in four representative operas and their production/reception history: Verdi's Aida, Bizet's Carmen, Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo, and Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The remainder of the course explores transformations and deformations of these narrative types in the twentieth century: cinematic appropriations of Carmen (Saura, Brook), shifts of emphasis from the colonizer to the colonized (Sessions, Montezuma, or Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexiko), the repatriation and decolonization of Madama Butterfly in Japan (the Bunraku O-Cho-fujin, the Takarazuka Three-Generation Cho-Cho-san), or the mapping of its racial problematic onto sexual politics (M. Butterfly). Discussions will involve both text (in English translation) and music, and the ways in which they interact. Ability to read music will be helpful but is not required.