Handel's Serse was a flop at its 1738 London premiere but has since come to be one of his most enduring and beloved operas. Hear excerpts (including the famous aria "Ombra mai fu") sung live by members of the Haymarket Opera Company in a sneak-preview of their September production at the Studebaker Theater. University of Chicago Professor Robert L. Kendrick leads a discussion of the history of this master work. Northwestern University Professor Alessandra Visconti discusses issues of Italian diction and translation.

Haymarket Opera Company enriches the musical community of Chicago and the Midwest with performances of 17th- and 18th-century music. HOC is the most active early opera company in the United States, using period instruments and historically-informed vocal practices and staging conventions, seeking to engage audiences of all ages with passionate performances of both familiar and neglected works.

Robert L. Kendrick works largely in early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, music and commemoration, and the visual arts. His most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (Indiana UP, 2014), and recent graduate seminars include: ‘European Sacred Music Abroad, 1550-1730’; ‘Senecan Drama, Stoicism, and Baroque Opera’ (co-taught)'; and 'Music and Images in Early Modern Europe'. He has taught on the Rome and Vienna programs of the Civilization Core, as well as undergraduate ethnomusicology. In 2006 he won a Graduate Teaching Award. His books are The Sound of Milan, 1580-1650 (2002) and Celestial Sirens (1996) and he has edited the motets of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani for A-R Editions (1998). He has advised or worked with early music performers, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia, and Boston’s La Donna Musicale. At Chicago he is term faculty for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan), and affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies. A member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana, Kendrick received his Ph.D. (musicology) and M.A. (ethnomusicology) from New York University, after a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. A former autoworker and union activist, he is keenly interested in the issues around grad student, adjunct, and contingent-faculty labor in academia

Alessandra Visconti was born in Beirut, Lebanon and grew up in Rome. Her academic background includes studies in comparative literature at the University of Venice, a degree in Historical Performance at the Mannes College of Music in NYC and an MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She has performed throughout the US, Europe and Japan and can be heard on critically acclaimed recordings of medieval, renaissance and baroque music. She coaches operatic diction at the Chicago Opera Theater and the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and has performed with the New York Choral Artists, Musica Sacra, the Newberry Consort, Music of the Baroque, Schola Antiqua of Chicago and the Beyond the Score series with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She has published two Italian language manuals with McGraw-Hill and is currently doing research on the acquisition of Italian by speakers of Spanish.