Star Wars: an opera in 5 acts

Who hasn't thought of Star Wars as a Meyerbeer-style rescue opera?
Ok, maybe that is just the opera geek in me. But the cast and plot have much in common with the grand opera of the 19th century. Hero rescues princess and wins a battle in the struggle against an oppressive empire, amid local color, grand spectacle, and grand music.
Ironically, the music would be one major obstacle in the translation of Star Wars from film epic to grand opera: John Williams doesn't seem likely to write an opera himself or allow his music to be incorporated into one. So a composer taking the story (with rights to use it) would need to create a new musical vocabulary for this piece: something iconic and unique enough to distinguish itself from the film's music, while balancing between operatic and vernacular to reach an audience appropriate to such a fusion of grand art and modern fairy tale. I don't think I could dream in my lifetime of doing Star Wars justice. But maybe someone else out there could.

Don Giovanni: Nobilità and other complications - Spring 2011

Analysis


As with The Marriage of Figaro and its companions in Beaumarchais’ trilogy, nobility is a key concept in Don Giovanni. If you don’t have it (by birth), you try to compete with it, or gain it by other means; if you have it by birth, you have a blank check which extends beyond currency into the realm of morals and privilege. Every character in Giovanni and Figaro is dealing with nobility on a conscious or unconscious level, and it

Subtitling Peppino - fall 2010

I Cento Passi was one of the films we watched in Mayder Dravasa's Intermediate Italian class, spring 2009. In fall 2010, I worked with Amy Boylan on an independent study of translation, and this paper was the final project, followed in spring 2011 by an Undergraduate Research Conference presentation.