The set for the author's expert course "Practical history of the opera". 

This course is designed for those who want to include opera as a genre in their list of artistic impressions (whether it's visiting famous opera houses or festivals or going on a film broadcast). The course is devoted to the history of opera on the one hand and the modern structure of the opera world and the most important figures of our time - on the other hand. The listener receives an "event map" - how and why the opera genre has changed so clearly in different eras. The course is accompanied by additional materials for each lecture, which are included in the price.

The author is Ilya Kukharenko, a candidate of sciences, theater critic, curator and playwright. The course includes 16 group classes of 3 hours duration. Classes are held once a week on weekdays fr om 19 to 22 (evening groups). At the end of the course a certificate is issued. The cost of the course is 66 000 rubles.  

Program:

Lecture 1. Map of modern opera. Opera as luxe; opera as art house; opera as contemporary art; opera as mass-market.

Lecture 2. How modern opera production works. Are there still real repertoire theatres in nature, with performances lasting 20 years each? What is better to know about modern festival and theatrical technologies of performance creation and programming in order to better understand the opera performances of our days? Opera in movies and on video as an engine of theatrical progress. Opera vs. Conductor. Brief history of two, not so opposite concepts in the XX-XXI centuries. The conductors are demiurgues and subversive directors; is there a question today: Kurentzis or Chernyakov?

Lecture 3. Birth of the opera. The first swallows of the 16th century. Florentine Chamber and Claudio Monteverdi. Interest in Monteverdi operas in the last quarter of the 20th century. Modern productions of Orpheus and Poppey's Coronations.

Lecture 4. Baroque as a new trend. Brief overview of the movement of the historically informed fr om the late '60s to the present day. Why do Handel, Vivaldi, Cavalli and Hasse attract the most radical directors?

Lecture 5. Georg Friedrich Handel and Antonio Vivaldi as one of the most repertoire composers of our days. "Alchina" as the new "Traviata". The most famous baroque operas and places where it is better of all the things he knows about them. A caste of baroque performers and a new Russian wave.

Lecture 6. French opera tradition. Jean Baptiste Lully and Jean Philippe Rameau. Versailles reconstructions and modern rethinking. Opera in England before Handel. Henry Purcell and others. How modern interpreters treat the heritage of the English Restoration.

Lecture 7. XVIII century - Castrates, Prima donnas and composers. Italian opera in Italy and for its in the second half of the 18th century. Is it worth interrupting this great-great-grandmother the chest and why did Christoph Willibald Glitch's reform end up in the end?

Lecture 8. Glitch and his reform. Why did Glitch's innovations affect both Mozart and Wagner and his subsequent romanticism and post-romanticism. Interest in Glitch in the XIX and XXI centuries. Who and how today puts "Orpheus and Eurydice, Alcestu and Iphigenia in Tavrida?

Lecture 9. Mozart and his main operas. What did Mozart-Da Ponte's trilogy Don Giovanni do are all coming in, Figaro's Wedding, the cornerstone of the world's repertoire? How to listen today and perceive the Magic Flute. Does Mozart still have great operas about which he has a wide the audience has no idea? Why did Mozart swear on both the composers of Italian bel canto and Wagner and already in the 20th century, Richard Strauss? How did Mozart and his operas become one of the first "gasoline" of the director's theatre and festival movement, which was born in the 20th century. 

Lecture 10. Opera in the XIX century. Brief review of opera in Italy, Germany-Austria, France and Russia. Why do such different composers as Wagner and Bellini have the right to be called romantics? Why was it the repertoire of the 19th century that was considered the most successful and successful until recently? What is it? What has changed?

Lecture 11: The Bel Canto Age. Bellini Donizetti-Rossini and early Verdi. A new look at vocal art, new musical merits. Maria Kallas and Belcanto boom in the 20th century. Can these plots be staged as a modern history? Who succeeds? A new wave of Russian singers who are specialists in bel canto.

Lecture 12. Giuseppe Verdi and the Italian opera of the second half of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. Giacomo Puccini and believers. New drama, new stories, new relationships between voice and orchestra. Why exactly around the director's interpretations of Verdi and Puccini today break the most acute spears? Wh ere do you go for crinolines and wh ere do you go for office suits?

Lecture 13. Russian opera of the XIX century. Why are there only Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and just recently Rimsky-Korsakov? Are these names doomed exclusively for Russian or Russian-speaking performers, conductors and directors? Or a possible Western apportionment? Who it makes sense to watch and listen to in Russia and abroad.

Lecture 14. Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. Opera as a monumental musical drama. Why Wagner was so much more influential than Wagner