The Humanities and Opera Education Hub is a resource designed for high school educators. It provides educational materials focused on literary works that have been adapted into operas and films. 

With the Education Hub resources, teachers can guide students in examining how stories are transformed through opera and film. By reflecting on different creative choices, students will gain a deeper appreciation for storytelling and interpretation.  

Each work in the Education Hub has three accompanying lesson plans about adaptation. We’ve prepared everything you’ll need to teach each lesson, including lesson plans and scripts, slide decks, musical examples, handouts, and grading rubrics. Each lesson achieves Common Core State Standards and National Core Arts Standards, which you can reference below and in each lesson plan.  

No prior knowledge of opera is required to teach these lessons, nor do teachers need to be fluent in musical terminology to lead these lessons.  Definitions of musical and theater terms are provided for students and teachers alike in each lesson. Time stamps are provided on videos so students and teachers can easily find musical examples to support the lesson. 

If you’d like to see if this opera is being performed in your community, please see the National Opera Calendar.  

Why Adaptation?

Adaptations of literature play a unique role in the classroom for their potential to illuminate key themes from the source text and deepen a student’s understanding of the material. Adaptations can spark an in-depth conversation on the cultural underpinnings of a work, its social and political context, the societal lenses through which works of literature are viewed, and how those lenses may change over time. Opera offers many angles for discussion, including musical choice, libretto and story structure, staging, and design elements of costume, lighting, and scenery. By analyzing what the choices that the creators of the operas have made, or what choices they themselves would make — what to keep the same, what to change, what to cut, and how to show the story visually, to name a few — students develop a fuller understanding of the work and the role of interpretation in storytelling.  

How do I use these resources?

Each work includes everything you need to include this study in your curriculum – a lesson plan, script, slides, and when required, worksheets, videos, and additional resources. Each lesson is designed to be flexible to your students’ learning needs and classroom time. If you are only doing one lesson, we recommend doing Lesson #1: Exploring Story Adaptation. If you’re doing multiple lessons, we recommend doing them in the order they are published.  

Each lesson can be expanded into multiple classroom sessions, too, and the lesson plans include recommendations for how teachers can approach expansion. Students should be currently reading, or have already read, the source material, as they will need to identify key moments in the work and in some cases, compare them to the operatic setting. When asked to compare between the literary work and opera, we have selected the scenes for you and provided access to the media.  

By considering the creative choices involved in creating an adaptation of a literary work, students will develop a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of the source material.  

Lesson Overview

For each work of literature, we have created three lessons for each opera and work of literature pairing. Below are the main Common Core State Standards and National Core Arts Standards found in each lesson. Please refer to the individual lesson plans for any additional learning standards. 

Lesson #1: Exploring Story Adaptation

Students will use critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration while exploring the concept of story adaptation and how it relates to opera stories.

Common Core State Learning Standards:

National Core Arts Learning Standards:

Lesson #2: Responding to Key Scenes

Students will write a poem based on a character's emotions in response to the context in a key scene or turning point in the opera.

Common Core State Standards:

National Core Arts Standards:

Lesson #3: Production Design Adaptation 

Students will use critical thinking, creativity, social-emotional learning, and collaboration while exploring stage design and the visual world of storytelling in opera. 

Common Core State Standards:

National Core Arts Standards: