Editors' Preface: Opera and Interdisciplinarity

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 CARYL CLARK AND LINDA HUTCHEON Editors= Preface: Opera and Interdisciplinarity Opera has a long and continuous four-hundred-year history, and from the start it has been the most resolutely >interdisciplinary= of art forms. Richard Wagner called it the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, because it brought together all the resources of music, architecture, visual arts, dance, and literature. In recent years, the study of opera has begun to reflect this complexity, for it has ceased to be the sole property of musicologists. Everyone, from literary scholars to psychiatrists, from historians to political scientists, has been emboldened to bring their differing disciplinary expertise to this multifaceted art. This issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly reflects this shift, but in a different way. We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to address, from their own positions, topics related to two operas that were being performed in Toronto in the fall of 2002 B Igor Stravinsky=s Oedipus Rex (at the Canadian Opera Company) and George Frideric Handel=s Alcina (at the Faculty of Music, Opera Division, University of Toronto). Two one-day symposia (open to the general public) were held at the Munk Centre for International Studies as part of the Humanities Initiative developed there under the guidance of Centre Director Janice Stein. They were co-chaired by the editors of this special issue B a musicologist and a literary theorist whose interests in the interdisciplinary study of opera have expanded through coteaching a graduate seminar that brings together students from Comparative Literature, Drama, English, German, Italian, Music, and even Medicine. The Munk Centre symposia, sponsored in 2002B3 by the Chancellor Jackman Program in the Arts at the University of Toronto, continue the interdisciplinary exploration outside the classroom by foregrounding the political dimension of the operatic stories, their creation, and the culturally embedded work of productions past and present. The positive response of the audience to this interdisciplinary dialogue and the repeated requests for copies of the papers prompted us to edit this issue, in which the (oral) papers appear rewritten for publication. The collaborative activity of teaching and research reaches beyond the seminar room and conference setting to you the reader (and opera-goer?) in this special issue devoted to explorations of Alcina and Oedipus. An unlikely pairing at first glance, we think you will find the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration further expanded through their juxtaposition. ...