For more than four centuries, opera has made us cry and laugh, and it still speaks to us today about ourselves and our lives. It does so by telling us stories of love and death, of power and despair, through a unique way of combining words, music and stage action, and ever new styles of performance. This course is designed to develop an understanding of the details of such combination and the way they cooperate in making an opera work in general and for us today. It does not develop chronologically, but through exposure to a selection of major works by Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. The presentations will be organised around individual operas, exploring their historical background, text and music, performing issues, reception history, and adaptation to other media (not necessarily in this sequence). Each opera will also be taken as a vantage point to explore one main thematic issue, while broader issues – such as genre, the development of formal conventions of librettos and music, Italian opera and its terminology, modes of production, cultural expression, social factors that give rise to certain narratives, how opera fits into the larger history of ideas in Western culture – will build up over the course.