As part of our extracurricular cultural activities, the Honors Program had the pleasure of going to the opera not once but twice this semester.
In March, we took our students to see Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera. Set in 1930s Seville, this comedy of manners and morals is one of the most popular operas in the Met’s repertoire with music composed by Mozart. Le Nozze di Figaro made for a fun evening full of laughs and we all thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see this classic about the servants Figaro and Susanna who are trying to get married but must first thwart their married employer’s attempts to seduce Susanna while teaching him a lesson in fidelity.
Then, in April, we went to see a completely different type of opera. Elektra, composed by Richard Strauss, was an intense performance where the drama unfolded in a single act that was less than two hours. This opera about the grieving Elektra who seeks to avenge her father’s death combines Greek tragedy with the insights of early-20th-century Freudian psychology, making for a powerful performance, both vocally and emotionally.
And then the very next day after Elektra, we went back to Lincoln Center again, but this time to David Geffen Hall to hear Mahler’s Symphony 9, conducted by Bernard Haitink. This symphony has been described as “music coming from another world” and Mahler’s “greatest achievement.”
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