Participants' Topics and Bios

Patricia Brauner (University of Chicago)

Paper Title: "Fiasco! Fallacies, Facts, and the New Critical Edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia."

Profesor Brauner is managing editor of the Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag) and Coordinator for The Center for Italian Opera Studies at The University of Chicago. Her degrees are from Yale University, the University of Chicago and Connecticut College (summa cum laude). She has also worked on the critical editions of Rossini works: Petite Messe solennelle (2 pianos & harmonium), with Philip Gossett, Il barbiere di Siviglia, to be performed by Lyric Opera of Chicago, in 2008, La pietra del paragone, with Anders Wiklund, La riconoscenza / Il vero omaggio, 2003, Armida, with Charles S. Brauner, 1997 and Ermione, with Philip Gossett, 1995. Some of her articles include: "Feverish Composition: Writing La pietra del paragone." The Center for Italian Opera Studies, Online, "Editing Rossini." In The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, edited by Emanuele Senici. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 and " 'Il poeta con le carte... Il Maestro con la parte...': Insights into La pietra del paragone through the Autograph and Other Documents."

Deborah Burton (Boston University, School of Music)

Paper Title: "In his shoes: The Marriage of Figaro and the Movies"

Having received her doctorate from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on Puccini, Deborah Burton now teaches at Boston University, and has taught at Harvard University, UMass-Amherst, Florida International University, Fordham University, the University of Michigan, Adrian College and the Yale School of Music. Her research interests are opera analysis, counterpoint, and history of theory, with an emphasis on Italian sources. She recently spoke at the 2006 Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Mannes College of Music, New York, on "Men Who Love Too Much: Operatic Heroes and the Metric and Tonal Disturbances that Follow Them." In 1994, Dr. Burton gave the first paper on Puccini at a Society for Music Theory national meeting. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Theoria, Studi Musicali, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, Opera Quarterly, Studi Musicali Toscani, and Quaderni pucciniani. She is the co-editor of Tosca's Prism: Three Moments of Western Cultural History (Northeastern University Press, 2004), which won an AMS subvention grant. Dr. Burton was an originator of and participant in the international, interdisciplinary bilingual conference, Tosca 2000 in Rome, Italy, which was held in honor of the centennial of Puccini's Tosca and the bicentennial of the historical events on which it was based.

John A. Davis (University of Connecticut, Storrs)

Paper Title: 'Politics & Melodrama: Opera and the Italian Risorgimento'

Professor Davis holds the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (Oxford University Press 2007) has won the 2007 Helen and Howard Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association and the Premio Sele d'Oro. Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Davis is also the general editor of the seven volume Oxford Short History of Italy He has published a number of essays on opera, the theatre and censorship in the Risorgimento, including a chapter on Italy in the forthcoming Theater and Censorship in 19th Century Europe ed Robert J Goldstein (Berghahn Press New York & Oxford, due 2008).

Sidney Friedman (Boston University, School of Theater)

Paper Title:"Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Playwright, Harpist and Clockmaker."

Sidney Friedman, director of nearly one hundred theatrical productions, teaches directing and dramatic literature/theatre history at Boston University. He has also taught various courses in playwriting, acting, movement and voice. Currently, he is Coordinator (and co-founder) of the Theatre Arts major, an innovative program in the collaborative creation of new works for the theatre at B.U.'s School of Theatre. Before coming to Boston University, he co-founded and chaired the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis.

Helen Greenwald (New England Conservatory/University of Chicago)

Paper Title:"Rossini on the Road: Barbiere, Beethoven, Belloy, and Vienna"

Helen Greenwald has taught in the Department of Music History and Musicology at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1991, and is Visiting Professor in the Music Department at the University of Chicago, winter-spring 2008. Her work has appeared in such journals as 19th-Century Music, Acta Musicologica, Music & Letters, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Current Musicology, the Mozart-Jahrbuch, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Cambridge Opera Journal. Greenwald was contributing curator and consultant to the international exhibition, "La Scena di Puccini," shown 2003 - 2004 at the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca, Italy. She is co-editor with Kathleen Hansell of the critical edition of Rossini's Zelmira (Fondazione Rossini/Ricordi, 2005), and is currently editing Verdi's Attila for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press/Ricordi).Other ongoing projects include the Oxford Handbook of Opera (Oxford University Press), and the Puccini volume for the New Grove Composer's Series (Oxford University Press).

Samuel Headrick (Boston University, School of Music)

Samuel Headrick earned his PhD at the Eastman School of Music, studying with Samuel Adler and Joseph Schwantner. On the faculty of Boston University since 1981, he has also served as Co-Director & Conductor of the Boston University Contemporary Collegium. He has received numerous performances and commissions from such venues as the St. Louis Symphony Chamber Players, the Iraklion International Festival of the Arts, The Savannah Onstage International Arts Festival, The Opera Laboratory Theater Company, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, Time's Arrow, and the Finnish Radio Company, among many others. He has received a Massachusetts Artist Fellowship in Composition, two National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowships, Composer-in-Residence at SUNY-Potsdam, and Artist in Residence at the Berklee College of Music. Other awards include two Meet the Composer grants and two Composer Residencies with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. ASCAP has awarded him for 26 consecutive years in recognition of his concert music. Important premieres in 2007 included a one-act chamber opera Hostage, directed by Craig Wich and premiered during the Boston University Opera Institute's 11th annual Fringe Festival. Mr. Headrick's music may be heard on the Mark Custom and Summit labels.

John Musto (New York City)

Composer and pianist John Musto studied at the Manhattan School of Music, with Seymour Lipkin and Paul Jacobs. He has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn College and is a frequent guest lecturer at the Juilliard and the Manhattan Schools of Music. Mr. Musto was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral song cycle Dove Sta Amore. In 2000 he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship at Bellagio, Italy, and he has recently been chosen for a 2006 Lakond Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also garnered two Mid-Atlantic Emmys and two CINE Awards for his scores written for public television. Mr. Musto has been featured on the Great Performers series at Lincoln and the Composer Portrait series at Columbia's Miller Theater. Mr. Musto's first opera, the comedy Volpone, with librettist Mark Campbell, had its second production at Wolftrap Opera this summer, having been premiered in March 2004. His second opera with Mr. Campbell, Later the Same Evening, was commissioned by the University of Maryland and the National Gallery in Washington, and was premiered in November at both venues. They are currently working on a co-commission by the Opera Theater of St. Louis and the Wolftrap Opera to premiere in 2010.

Martin Pearlman (Boston University, School of Music)

Paper Title: "Performing Baroque opera today: issues in Monteverdi and Handel."

Professor Pearlman is among this country's leading interpreters of Baroque and Classical music on both period and modern instruments. He is the founder, music director, and conductor of Boston Baroque, which has an annual concert series in Greater Boston, tours in the U.S. and Europe, has produced 16 major recordings with Telarc and has received three Grammy nominations. Highlights of his work include the complete Monteverdi opera cycle, with his own new performing editions of The Coronation of Poppea and The Return of Ulysses; the American premiere of Rameau's Zoroastre; the New England premieres of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and Alceste; a Handel series including Alcina, Giulio Cesare, and Agrippina, and a series of Mozart operas including Abduction from the Seraglio, The Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, The Impresario, and Don Giovanni, the last of which was broadcast nationally on public radio. Mr. Pearlman's completion and orchestration of music from Mozart's Lo Sposo Deluso, his performing version of Purcell's Comical History of Don Quixote, and his new orchestration of Cimarosa's Il Maestro di Cappella were all premiered by Boston Baroque.

John Platoff (Trinity College)

Paper Title: "Mozart writes a sequel: Figaro, Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Operatic Life in Vienna"

John Platoff received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He also spent several years in New York City as a piano student and performer, and studied at the Aspen Music Festival with Claude Frank. At Trinity he teaches a wide range of courses in music history, as well as courses in music theory and the psychology of music. He has also taught as a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University. Professor Platoff's published articles have appeared in publications including Mozart Studies 2, Cambridge Opera Journal, The Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Nineteenth Century Music. These articles have chiefly concerned Mozart and Italian opera buffa, in particular the stylistic relationship between Mozart's operas and those of his less well-known contemporaries, such as Paisiello and Salieri. He has also written and published on the string quartets of Beethoven and on the music of the Beatles.

Hilary Poriss (Northeastern University)

Paper Title: "The Myth of a Lost Original in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia."

Hilary Poriss is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Cincinnati before moving to Boston. Last year she was the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Italian opera and diva culture. She has recently completed her book, Changing the Score: Insertion Arias, Opera Singers, and the Authority of Performance, and her articles have appeared in 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and other musicological journals and books.

Cynthia Verba (Harvard University)

Paper Title: "Rameau as 'Conservative Progressive': Cultural Expectations and Musical Tragedy in the French Enlightenment."

Cynthia Verba is a Lecturer in the Harvard University Extension School, teaching music history; Her scholarship includes Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750-1765, (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1993). More recently, she has published a chapter, "Music and the Enlightenment," in The Enlightenment World (Routledge Press, 2004). In the area of opera, she is currently working on a study of Rameau's tragedies, which is tentatively titled, Between Reason and Feeling: Gender in the Tragedies Lyriques of Jean-Philippe Rameau. She has published an article in the Cambridge Opera Journal (1999), entitled "What Recitatives Owe to the Airs: A Look at a Dramatic Dialogue Scene from a Tragic Opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, by Jean-Philippe Rameau." Additional articles and reviews appear in journals that include Journal of the American Musicological Association, The Journal of Musicology, and the Journal of Modern History. She has been a Fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and a recipient of a National Foundation for the Humanities Summer Grant.

Gottfried Wagner (Milan, Italy)

Paper Title: "The Wagner Salvation, Inc.: from Richard Wagner to Hitler and New Bayreuth's Philosemitism"

Gottfried H. Wagner, born in 1947 in Bayreuth, studied musicology, philosophy and German philology in Germany and Austria and wrote his Ph.D. on Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht at the University of Vienna, published later as book in Germany, Italy and Japan. Central to his studies are German and European culture and politics of the 19th and 20th century in connection with Jewish culture and history. His studies are published in 11 languages. He works internationally as a multimedia director, musicologist and writer. He received different awards for his artistic and academic activities as well as for his humanitarian involvements. In 1992, he co-founded with Dr. Abraham Peck "The Post- Holocaust Dialogue Group". His autobiography The Twilight of the Wagners, published first in Germany in 1997, created world-wide interest and is translated in 6 languages (USA: Picador 1999). He has been living in Italy since 1983.

Peter Westergaard (Princeton University)

Educated at Harvard and Princeton M.F.A., composer Peter Westergaard studied with Darius Milhaud (Aspen, Paris), Walter Piston (Harvard), Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone (Princeton) Wolfgang Fortner (Detmold, Germany). He has taught at the Staatliche Hochschule fr Musik, Freiburg in Breisgau, Columbia University, Amherst College,and Princeton, where he succeeded Sessions and Babbitt as William Shubael Conant Professor of Music. His seven operas include "Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos" (1965), "The Tempest" (1990), "Moby Dick" (2003), "Alice in Wonderland" (2007), and "The Always Present Present" (2008, premiere 7 March at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia). Also active as a theorist, Professor Westergaard has authored Introduction to Tonal Theory (W.W. Norton, 1975), articles including "Toward a Twelve-Tone Polyphony," "Sung Language," and "Geometries of Sound in Time"). He has also been a stage director (15 productions with the Princeton University Opera Theater and the Opera Festival of New Jersey, which he founded with the conductor Michael Pratt), and writer of English singing translations of operas (from Incoronazione di Poppea to Gianni Schicchi and L'Enfant et les Sortileges and others.

Scott Wheeler (Emerson College)

Scott Wheeler received his doctorate from Brandeis, where his principal teachers were Lewis Spratlan and Arthur Berger; he pursued further study at the Tanglewood Music Center (with Olivier Messiaen), the Dartington School (with Peter Maxwell Davies) and privately with Virgil Thomson. He teaches at Emerson College, and in 1975 he was a founding member of the new-music ensemble Dinosaur Annex. Mr. Wheeler's most recent commission is for the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theatre. Other commissions and performances include the orchestras of Minnesota, Houston, Toledo and Indianapolis, as well as New York City Opera, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Scott Wheeler's opera Democracy: An American Comedy, on a libretto of Romulus Linney, was commissioned by the Washington National Opera and premiered by them in January 2005.. He has received awards and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, Tanglewood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, Yaddo, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the Stoeger Prize for excellence in chamber music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He was a Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007.