The Department of French & Italian
presents a lecture by
Sergio Ferrarese
The Reform of the Myth and the
Myth of Reform: Orpheus and Theater
in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
4:00 pm
Sassafras Room,
Indiana Memorial Union
This paper discusses the origins of the melodrama, its formal consolidation in the baroque period, and its culmination as a social and political mirror of the age of the Enlightenment. The myth of Orpheus, poet and musician, is present throughout the history of the opera in musica, but particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as representative of the ideal synthesis of music and word that composers and librettists struggled to achieve. As the Orpheus myth is re-formed in service of the melodrama, the social, political and religious reformations of the time are reflected and refracted onstage, particularly in Glück-Calzabigi’s Orfeo, which glorified the enlightened despotism of the Hapsburg Empire.
Sergio Ferrarese holds a PhD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his dissertation was entitled “Le metamorfosi del mito di Orfeo nella letteratura italiana e nel melodrama.” He is currently a Lecturing Fellow at Duke University.
If you have a disability and need assistance, special arrangements can be made to accommodate most needs. Contact Isabel Piedmont at 855-5458 or ipiedmon @indiana.edu.
