Profs & Pints DC: A Night at the Opera House

Profs and Pints DC presents: “A Night at the Opera House,” on the classic design and mass construction of a performance space found throughout the world, with Laura Vasilyeva, associate professor of music history at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute and author of Opera and the Built Environment.

Even those who have never entered a classic Italian opera house, or teatro all’italiana, are likely to have some familiarity with its iconic look and feel. Its architectural form has been described as one of the most stable ever designed for musical performance, so successful that it was reproduced thousands of times in the 1800s alone and exists on five continents.

What is it about this building design that gives it such appeal and staying power?

Hear that question tackled by Laura Vasilyeva, a researcher of nineteenth-century Italian opera who has extensively studied the spaces where such performances are staged.

She’ll discuss…