Ellen Rosand will be coming to speak in the Seminar on Cultural History on “Poppea’s Fortune” on Wednesday, October 26, 2011.
Ellen Rosand is a George A. Saden professor of Music at Yale University, where she also serves as Founding Director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project. She received her B.A. from Vassar College, her M.A. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. from New York University. Before joining the faculty at Yale, Rosand also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University, and New York University. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. She has also written several books, including Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (University of California Press, 1991) which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award for best book from the American Musicological Society, and Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (University of California Press, 2007).

Rosand’s talk will discuss the changing reception of Monteverdi’s great opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, over the course of the past half-century. She will examine some of the most recent attempts to come to grips with its notorious ambiguities, including the Glyndebourne production of 2009, and will present some newly discovered source materials that illuminate the effect of the opera on its original audiences.
Please RSVP and join us in the Lecture Hall at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West, at 5:45pm for a reception before the talk.