Lectures and Special Events
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Musical Theater
Broadway Musical Theater: A Window onto America
Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater, Princeton University
How is musical theater in conversation with U.S. history? How do the conventions of musicals tell audiences how to look and listen, and what to think and feel? In this lecture, Stacy Wolf will discuss how and why this form of art and entertainment is at once so popular and so illuminating. Examples will include Guys and Dolls, Cabaret, Once Upon a Mattress, A Chorus Line, The Phantom of Opera, and Wicked.
Wednesday, June 6, 7:30pm | Princeton Public Library
Hell-Bent: Visions in Poetry, Art and Music
Visions of Hell in Poetry — Comedy and Tragedy in Dante's "Inferno"
Robert Hollander, Professor of European Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University
While the "Inferno" operates as a comedy in its views of justice in God's universe, it also has room for the comic — funny stuff — in its vision of damned humanity. Each sinner's tale may offer a tragic view of his or her life and death.
Tuesday, June 12, 7:30pm | Princeton Public Library
Visions of Hell in Art — An Illustrated Tour
Marianne Grey, Princeton University Art Museum Docent
Long before Dante defined "The Inferno", people of many cultures had imagined and artists had depicted images of a nether world where judgments were rendered for acts committed in the land of the living. Marianne Grey will illustrate a Tour of Hells through images from sculptures, manuscripts, woodcuts and paintings.
Monday, June 18, 7:30pm | Princeton Public Library
Thursday, June 21, 7pm | Lawrence Library
Visions of Hell in Music
Timothy Urban, Professor of Music, Rider University
Dante's Divine Comedy served as the source for two very different 20th century operas: Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Rachmaninoff's Francesca da Rimini. While characters in both operas find themselves in Dante's inferno, how they got there and the musical language used by the two composers could not be more different. Comedy is contrasted with tragedy, Italian lyricism with the pathos of Russian romanticism while both are cloaked in the hyper-expressive musical language of the 20th century.
Saturday, June 9, 3pm | West Windsor Library
Wednesday, June 20, 7:30pm | Princeton Public Library
Visions of Hell in Poetry — Putting Words in Their Mouths
Nancy Goldsmith, Fletcher Opera Institute, University of North Carolina School of the Arts
The use of supertitles has become essential to every opera performance. Using the plot and the libretto as a starting point, the emotional content of the music, the conceptual intentions of the music and the staging enter into the wording of the supertitles. The creation of the supertitles for Gianni Schicchi and Francesca da Rimini will be contrasted with each other and with the original translations of Dante into Italian and Russian.
