Mozart's Magic Flute and the Politics of Truth Telling (Music)

What can music teach us about the truth?  In this seminar, we’ll explore how Mozart’s most famous opera interrogates the concept of truth through a complex dramatization of Enlightenment and deception.  In its shifting portrayals of good and evil, its blend of fantasy with rationality, the opera asks how truth is constructed, revealed, and communicated.  It also allows us a glimpse at a world—perhaps not our own—in which universal truth is best expressed in music.