Mozart's Worlds: The German Operas

FAIN: ES-50292-09

University of Dayton (Dayton, OH 45469-0001)
Richard P. Benedum (Project Director: March 2009 to September 2011)

A four-week school teacher institute in Vienna, Austria, for twenty-five participants to explore Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his German operas in their cultural and historical context.

The University of Dayton seeks support for a four-week interdisciplinary institute, "Mozart's Worlds: The German Operas," for twenty five teachers chosen from across the country. We will study intensively Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) and Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), bookends to the final decade of his life, after he had moved to Vienna. This Institute reflects the belief that scholarship, cultural and historical context, and curriculum development should be closely linked. Thus, the Institute will immerse its 25 participants in these multiple "worlds" of Mozart: eighteenth century Hapsburg history and Enlightenment philosophy, the built environment of Vienna with its imperial architecture, the dramatic and literary conventions that Mozart inherited, understood, and used so successfully, and of course, his music.