For any opera by Mozart, Wagner or Puccini, we can compare multiple recordings and stagings of different productions. We may read biographies and the composer's letters, and perhaps skim analytical and interpretive books and articles on the opera. But how do we gear up for a brand-new opera when no published recording, score or libretto may be available? Do blog postings, tweets and interview sound bites offer the same sorts of information as published biographies and correspondence? For over 400 years, opera buffs have known that there exist few experiences as thrilling as encountering a brand-new work. Join us for this online course as we prepare to face the challenges and relish the pleasures of meeting Nico Muhly's powerful chamber opera Dark Sisters (2011), co-commissioned and co-produced by Music-Theatre Group, Gotham Chamber Opera and Opera Company of Philadelphia.

Dark Sisters follows one woman's dangerous attempt to escape her life as a member of the FLDS Church (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints), a sect that split from mainstream Mormonism in the early 20th century largely because of the LDS Church's renunciation of polygamy. The male founders of the Mormon faith (Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, chief among them) have traditionally loomed large in American history; Dark Sisters puts the women of the FLDS sect front and center. The narrative draws inspiration from the flurry of media attention surrounding the two most infamous raids on FLDS compounds (the 1953 raid at Short Creek, AZ, and the 2008 raid at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, TX), as well as the stories of the over 80 wives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Set against a red-earthed landscape filled with revelations, dark prophets and white temples stretching towards heaven, Dark Sisters charts one woman's quest for self-discovery in a world where personal identity is forbidden.

About the Instructor
W. Anthony Sheppard is professor of music at Williams College where he teaches courses in 20th-century music, opera, popular music and Asian music. He earned his B.A. at Amherst College and his M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. His research interests include 20th-century opera and music theater, vocal timbre, cross-cultural influence and exoticism, American music history and film music. His first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, (University of California Press, 2001) received the Kurt Weill Prize, his article on Madama Butterfly and film earned the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and his article on World War II film music was honored with the Alfred Einstein Award by the American Musicological Society. His research has been supported by grants from the NEH, the American Philosophical Society and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is currently completing a book entitled Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination and is launching a new project entitled The Performer's Voice: Timbre and Expression in Twentieth-Century Vocal Music. Sheppard frequently lectures for the Metropolitan Opera Guild and at major universities in the U.S. and U.K., and he delivered the AMS-Library of Congress lecture in fall 2010. He currently serves as a director-at-large of the American Musicological Society and has been named the next editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.