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 BACK TO: Using to Teach Humanities About the Author and Acknowledgements How To Use This Study Guide This guide is intended mainly for high school students and their teachers, but it may also prove useful to college students and other listeners who want to explore these operas in some depth. Elsewhere on this site you will find plot summaries of the broadcast operas, composer biographies, and basic background information. To get the most value from the study guide, we suggest that you consult this information first. If possible, you should also read the libretto (The Met publishes libretti for all its operas, and most recordings contain booklets with texts and translations). The broadcasts themselves include spoken plot summaries, and the Texaco intermission features provide valuable insights. Opera News, published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, functions as a guide to the broadcasts during the season, and contains excellent articles about each opera, with production photos and other illustrations. Productions of many of these operas (including some from the Met) are available on video. This guide is not devoted to musical analysis, although inevitably there is some discussion of the music itself. We are concerned here with a "humanities" or "interdisciplinary" approach. We examine the meanings, sources, and analogues of the libretto; the cultural context in which the opera was written and performed; the various and often contradictory critical responses to it; its relation to other operas by the same creators, to other operas with similar themes, and to works of art in other media. Much attention is given to such perennial aesthetic questions as the relation between words and music; the problems of adaptation from other narrative and dramatic forms; the apparent changes in the meaning of a work over time; and how opera relates to our own lives beyond the immediate experience of seeing or hearing it. The guide for each opera is divided into three sections: A. Setting the Stage; B. Questions for Discussion and Writing; C. Projects and Further Study. A. Setting the Stage This section consists of a set of quotations from primary and secondary sources about the broadcast opera, each followed by the name of the author. These include composers, librettists, historians, critics, and scholars. Some are contemporaries of the creators; others are more recent. These quotations are not intended to be an exhaustive study; they were selected for the insights they provide and the issues they raise. Please realize that not all these statements are "authoritative," even those by the creators of the opera themselves; you can't always trust what they say. Especially in interpretive matters, we often place two contradictory statements side by side. We urge you to question and challenge such statements.B. Questions for Discussion and Writing Most of the questions emerge from the source material given in Section A. These are open-ended questions, designed to provoke critical thought, stimulate discussion, and lead to further questions. From them students and teachers may wish to devise essay topics or other forms of response.C. Projects and Further Study For students who wish to go beyond the materials presented here, we suggest topics and sources for research: students may read works from which libretti were crafted; listen to other operas by the same composer or operas that have elements in common with the one under consideration; explore the historical context of the opera; investigate larger social or cultural issues related to the opera; and so on. We also sometimes suggest "creative" projects involving the composition of a literary or art work inspired by the broadcast opera. As with the questions in Section B, these projects emerge mostly from issues raised by the writers in "Setting the Stage." And like Section B, this one offers only a few possibilities; students are encouraged to roam wherever their interests and imagination take them.At the end of the study guide is a bibliography of several dozen works. The quotations in "Setting the Stage" come from these works. Regular listeners to the Texaco broadcasts will recognize such familiar commentators as Owen Lee, George Jellinek, and Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, and readers of Opera News will notice several of their favorite writers. The critical literature in the field of opera is large and growing, and students who investigate libraries, bookstores, and online sources will find plenty to read. I have not provided a list of recordings, but all operas in the standard repertory have received many studio recordings, and even obscure operas like The Gambler and Doktor Faust are available in one or more editions. Opera News always recommends recordings of the broadcast operas; there are a number of published guides to recorded opera; and you can consult the standard record catalogues for more complete listings. And while you're doing all this, don't forget to enjoy the opera. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Zeke Hecker has lived in Guilford, Vermont, and taught English at Brattleboro Union High School since 1971. He is principal oboist of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and the Windham Orchestra, co-founder of Friends of Music at Guilford, and a member of the board of directors of the Consortium of Vermont Composers.Zeke Hecker has composed over one hundred works, including orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal, incidental music for plays and films, and opera. The latter include Pericles, Prince of Ture (after Shakespeare, first performed in 1981) and the one act Mushrooms (U.S. premiere 1978, London premiere 1999). His musical comedy Barataria was staged in 1998. His works have been played throughout New England, and from California and Nevada to Barcelona; they have recently been broadcast on public radio in Massachusetts and Vermont. He wrote the score for the award-winning documentary film The Stuff of Dreams, which has been shown on PBS television. He has received grants from Meet the Composer, the Vermont Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Council for Basic Education, among other organizations. As local coordinator of the Met School Membership program at Brattleboro Union High School, Zeke Hecker has helped introduce opera to hundreds of high school students over the past decade. Among his favorite operas are Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Verdi's Otello, and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Aaryn Post, coordinator of the Met School Membership Program, for inviting me to assemble this study guide; her current and previous colleagues in the Program, especially Jane Komarov, who helped raise it to its current high standard; Texaco, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and its Education Department, whose support affirms the Program's value; my former department head at Brattleboro Union High School, George F. Lewis, whose boundless enthusiasm for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, opera first brought BUHS to the Met over thirty years ago; the BUHS board, administrators, and teachers who accommodate our visits to the Met; my own high school teacher Rod Parke, who inspired my love for opera; and my students past and present whose pleasure in operagoing has increased my own many times over.Zeke Hecker Guilford, Vermont  - HOME
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