Thinking with Opera

Who is Carmen? Is she really the exotic femme fatale of popular imagination, or is there more about her story that can be told? How could this be accomplished?In this special instalment of Thinking With Opera, recorded live at a seminar in the Howard Assembly Room at Opera North in February 2022, Professor Edward Venn looks at the many ways in which different operatic components come together to create meaning in Carmen.Focusing on Edward Dick’s 2021 production for Opera North, he hears from creative personnel from across Opera North, singers, a director and a conductor, the Head of Costume and Access Manager, and American academic Susan McClary, Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University.A DARE symposium in partnership with the University of Leeds, led by Professor Edward Venn from the School of Music, and supported by AHRC.

In the second of three episodes focusing on Wagner's epic final opera, New Yorker critic and author of Wagnerism and The Rest is Noise Alex Ross and Dr. Áine Sheil of the University of York discuss gender, sexuality and ritual in Parsifal, and in Richard Wagner’s work as a whole.The multi-faceted character of Kundry – ‘Wandering Jew’, mother, seductress – is unpicked, and ambiguous readings of the brotherhood of the Grail Knights are offered.Parsifal’s enduring mystery and power is seen through the disparate audiences for its early performances – from American debutantes sent to Bayreuth for their self-improvement, to gay men and women attracted by an atmosphere of acceptance unknown in the wider society of the time.Finally, there are close readings of the music itself: an echo from Wagner's 1868 opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the ‘androgyny’ of his scoring for orchestra, his experiments with instrumentation and tonality, and the astonishing ‘music of collapse’ in the Grail Procession in Act III. Excerpts from Parsifal recorded at the dress rehearsal for Opera North's 2022 concert staging are featured throughout.Introduced and chaired by Professor Frank Finlay of the University of Leeds.Thinking with Opera is produced by the DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds.

How do music, plot, staging, action, dance and performance combine to produce meaning for an opera audience? Taking a close look at Thomas Adès's The Tempest, Professor Edward Venn of the University of Leeds and choreographer and director Aletta Collins – who choreographed the opera's premiere in 2004 – explore the conversation between different elements in opera. They also consider notions of confinement and restricted movement in all three of Adès's operas.

“In cinema you are a spectator; in opera you are present. I’m fascinated by the notion that we witness in opera: we have to endure.” Ranging from Ancient Greece to The Godfather, and focusing on the operas of Puccini and Verdi, renowned art historian Professor Griselda Pollock discusses how violence is represented in painting, sculpture, film and literature, how it is performed in opera, and its implications. Produced as part of the DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leed