Lecture 6. Melody: Mozart and Wagner

Listening to Music (MUSI 112)

This lecture discusses melody and aesthetics; Professor Wright raises the question of what makes a melody beautiful, and uses excerpts from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to explore this issue. Throughout the discussion, the foundations of classical phrase-structure and harmonic progressions are used to explain some of the choices these three composers made.

00:00 – Chapter 1. What Makes a Melody Beautiful?
05:39 – Chapter 2. Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi: Cadences and Sequences
13:27 – Chapter 3. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde: Exploring Melodic Ascents and Descents
32:17 – Chapter 4. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro: Melodic Sequence Analysis

This course was recorded in Fall 2008.