Wendy Heller
Scheide Professor of Music History
Chair, Department of Music
Director of the Program in Italian Studies
Recognized as one of the leading scholars in baroque music, Heller has published widely on 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with special emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, dance history, and the classical tradition. Author of the award-wining Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, 2003), Heller’s recent publications include Music in the Baroque and its companion volume Anthology of Music in the Baroque (W. W. Norton, 2013), an essay on Bach’s Magnificat BWV 243, and the volume Staging History: Historical Drama in Britain and America, 1780–1860, co-edited with Michael Burden, Jonathan Hicks, and Ellen Lockhart.
Heller has earned numerous fellowships and prizes from such organizations as the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Winner of the Rome Prize, Heller has also been a been a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, an appointee at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies (as winner of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars), and was also the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She spent the 2014-15 academic year as an Old Dominion Fellow with the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and was recently named the Scheide Professor of Music History.
Heller is currently completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy and critical editions of Handel’s Admeto and Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, L’amazzone di Aragona, which was presented at the 2016 Schwetzingen Festival. A former member of the Board of the American Musicological Society, Heller is currently vice-president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Handel Society, the Venetian Advisory Board for the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and serves on numerous editorial board, including the Journal of Musicology and Cambridge Opera Journal.
Address: personal website:
http://wendy-heller.com
Chair, Department of Music
Director of the Program in Italian Studies
Recognized as one of the leading scholars in baroque music, Heller has published widely on 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with special emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, dance history, and the classical tradition. Author of the award-wining Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, 2003), Heller’s recent publications include Music in the Baroque and its companion volume Anthology of Music in the Baroque (W. W. Norton, 2013), an essay on Bach’s Magnificat BWV 243, and the volume Staging History: Historical Drama in Britain and America, 1780–1860, co-edited with Michael Burden, Jonathan Hicks, and Ellen Lockhart.
Heller has earned numerous fellowships and prizes from such organizations as the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Winner of the Rome Prize, Heller has also been a been a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, an appointee at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies (as winner of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars), and was also the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She spent the 2014-15 academic year as an Old Dominion Fellow with the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and was recently named the Scheide Professor of Music History.
Heller is currently completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy and critical editions of Handel’s Admeto and Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, L’amazzone di Aragona, which was presented at the 2016 Schwetzingen Festival. A former member of the Board of the American Musicological Society, Heller is currently vice-president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Handel Society, the Venetian Advisory Board for the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and serves on numerous editorial board, including the Journal of Musicology and Cambridge Opera Journal.
Address: personal website:
http://wendy-heller.com
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Papers by Wendy Heller
Antiopa giustificata, a drama guerriero featuring processions, floats, mock battles, and tableaux with musical interludes,and concluding with Medea vendicativa, a firework opera presented on presented on
a fl oating stage in the river Isar. While each of the installments of the trilogy are named for a female protagonist, it is the hero Theseus who serves as the link between these various episodes, in which song, dance, and elaborate stage effects show the consequences of loving an often dubious hero. The article explores the representation of female desire and male heroism in the context of this lavish theatrical event, focusing not only on the surviving poetry (and the musical implications therein), but also the descriptions and engravings of Santurini’s designs, preserved in the printed libretto.
Teaching Documents by Wendy Heller
Edited volumes by Wendy Heller
The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories – the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus – were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler’s Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance.
This illustrated volume, researched and written by experts in the field, explores contemporary theatrical documents (playbills, set designs, musical scores) and images (paintings, prints and illustrations) in seeking to explain what counted as history and historical truth for the writers, performers and audiences of these plays. In doing so it debates the peculiar contradictions of staging history and re-examines some spectacular box office hits.
Antiopa giustificata, a drama guerriero featuring processions, floats, mock battles, and tableaux with musical interludes,and concluding with Medea vendicativa, a firework opera presented on presented on
a fl oating stage in the river Isar. While each of the installments of the trilogy are named for a female protagonist, it is the hero Theseus who serves as the link between these various episodes, in which song, dance, and elaborate stage effects show the consequences of loving an often dubious hero. The article explores the representation of female desire and male heroism in the context of this lavish theatrical event, focusing not only on the surviving poetry (and the musical implications therein), but also the descriptions and engravings of Santurini’s designs, preserved in the printed libretto.
The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories – the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus – were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler’s Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance.
This illustrated volume, researched and written by experts in the field, explores contemporary theatrical documents (playbills, set designs, musical scores) and images (paintings, prints and illustrations) in seeking to explain what counted as history and historical truth for the writers, performers and audiences of these plays. In doing so it debates the peculiar contradictions of staging history and re-examines some spectacular box office hits.