This team-taught interdisciplinary seminar has the double aim of exploring the themes of music, sound, and the voice in Ovid’s epic poem and how later composers in turn gave voice to Metamorphoses through the musical, especially operatic works that it inspired. We will engage in the close study of Ovid’s treatment of myths like Marsyas, Orpheus and Eurydice and Echo and Narcissus in relation to earlier versions and then consider the continuities and differences between the poem’s soundworld and its musical realizations in works such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Strauss’ Daphne.
