Professor Coppola's Presentation at the April 2024 ASECS Conference

The Chair of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program, Dr. Catherine Coppola, was selected to present at the April 2024 Conference of the American Society for 18th Century Studies (ASECS) in Toronto, Canada. The ASECS (https://asecs.org) is a learned society based in the United States focused on interdisciplinary study of the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. The members of the society include, among others, literary scholars, musicologists, art historians, and historians. 

At the conference, Professor Coppola spoke on "Beaumont, Beaumarchais, and Mozart: 18th-Century Intersectionalists."  

Abstract for "Beaumont, Beaumarchais, and Mozart: 18th-Century Intersectionalists"

Intersectionality is not a 20th to 21st-century invention. Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s La Nouvelle Clarice (1767) argued that work on gender equity was directly related to work on the social ills caused by poverty (Alexandrova 2017). And the goals of wealthy female philanthropists in the 1780s who sought to help widows and orphans are nuanced by what Caryl Clark (2004) has called ‘class colonialism,’ as their views expressed in the Moralische Wochenschriften seemed to dominate the lower class—perhaps not unrelated to aid organizations that today make mistaken assumptions about what marginalized people need. Both Beaumont and the Moral Weeklies provide context for the feminist speech that Beaumarchais gives Marceline in Le mariage de Figaro (1778), where she excoriates upper-class men who take advantage of working-class girls and doom them to poverty. Heavily censored in the play, Marceline’s view did not make it into Mozart’s opera (1786). However, in 1793, Beaumarchais was invited to insert his cut dialogues into the Parisian premiere of the opera, and I will consider a 2020 production by Boston Opera Collaborative that used the full text in performing Mozart’s opera, as well as other productions that engage social issues by incorporating unhoused performers (St. Matthew Passion, Streetwise Opera, London) and those with mental health issues (The Magic Flute, Opera Montreal) (Renihan 2021). I will consider the fraught path of engaging directly with populations that are not typically part of the conversation (Hall-Tompkins 2022), and conclude with practical ways to bring relevance into the classroom study of eighteenth-century opera.

Dr. Coppola can be contacted at ccoppola@hunter.cuny.edu.