Figaro Meets Florence Nightingale: The Marriage of Opera & Public Health
Cross-listed PUBHLTH 3194 and MUSIC 3194
Faculty from Public Health and Music are teaching a class next semester (Spring 2021) about the representation of public health issues in opera. It will be taught online via Zoom. It is a four-hour class with two lectures per week and a one-hour, asynchronous lab. Content will be split equally between public health and music.
- Introduces students to important public health problems with a long history of causing morbidity and mortality in populations and explores their portrayal in opera.
- Identifies six public health themes and introduces students to the public health aspects of the conditions and then how they have been represented in multiple operas ranging from the 1700’s to current day.
- Examines original source texts, librettos, and staging (lighting, set design, costume, direction, and, of course, music composition) as to the ways and means by which disease and death are dramatized in the “great art form” of opera.
