ARIA SERIOUS?

"Homework??", you exclaim, "I didn't sign up for that!" No, you didn't. But Geisel Director of Education and Outreach Nicolas Reveles would like to talk about homework and its place in preparing to see an opera you might not know. Used to be we had to go through all sorts of contortions to go to the opera and understand what we were seeing & hearing because we didn't understand the languages being used. Now, of course, we have the amazing convenience of supertitles. But you can go 'deeper' than simply being able to know what the singers are singing about...

In a kind of expansion of our last episode of Opera 101, let's explore what all those operatic duets (or at least, most of them) are about: Love! Luckily, love is a major theme in all four of the operas that we're presenting in our 2014 Season: The Elixir of (naturally) Love, Pagliacci, A Masked Ball and Don Quixote. Dr. Nicolas Reveles, The Geisel Driector of Education and Outreach, discusses how our four different composers...Leoncavallo, Donizetti, Massenet and Verdi...approach love in four very different ways musically. Enjoy!