Rigoletto Opera Previews

August 26th - September 4th, 2025

Explore Rigoletto in a 90-minute presentation by Professor Mary Ann Smart.

Mary Ann Smart is the Gladyce Arata Terrill Endowed Chair and a professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Much of her research has focused on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. Her first book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (2004), drew on textual sources (treatises on acting, staging manuals) and musical evidence to suggest close ties between musical patterns and physical gesture in repertory stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Ring. Her second book, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848 (2018) tackled the fraught question of how opera mattered to audiences in nineteenth-century Italy, and how it made a difference to political and social realities during that period.

She has also co-edited books and journal issues on gender and sexuality in opera, nineteenth-century patterns of reception of French grand opera, and (with Nicholas Mathew) on musicology’s romance with “quirk historicism.” She has published articles on the lives and public images of nineteenth-century female singers, on the ways madness is depicted in opera, and on recent and contemporary staging of canonical opera. She is currently working on two book-length projects—a theoretical study of trends in opera production since 1970 and an alternative history of French theories of voice, music, and language in the twentieth century, extending from Proust through the speech archive of Ferdinand Brunot, Michel Leiris’s flamboyantly operatic memoirs, cabaret songs based on the poetry of Raymond Queneau, and the austere audiovisual experiments of Alain Resnais.

VIRTUAL PREVIEW