Tuesday, May 17
1 p.m.
Community Room
Dr. Bill Thierfelder will discuss Gaetano Donizetti’s most famous work, Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), arguably one of the most frequently-performed operas ever written.
This program explores not only Donizetti’s brief life and the musical genre called bel canto, but one of the conrerstone elements of Romantic literature, art, and music: The Mad Scene. The damsel in distress was already and established convention in the arts, finding its roots in Medieval literature, including Arthurian romances- but Romantic visionaries took it to new levels, with “women on the edge” scenes filling the pages of novels and poetry and being performed on stage and