Barber of Seville

Music Appreciation
Written By Edward Wolfe

For many 21st-Century Americans, opera is a kind of remote, incomprehensible mystery. Its joys and beauties remain out of reach for many of us.

Not me. I love the art form. It’s a combination of drama, beautiful music, amazing voices, and pageantry. Nothing compares to it.

Some years back, I came across some wonderful recordings of lectures given by the aficionado, Dr. Ira Ross. No, his doctorate is not in music; rather, it’s in dentistry! He approached opera as someone who simply loved the art form and not as a professional musician. So, in a sense his lectures, complete with their New Jersey accent, have even more credibility.

His knowledgeable lecture on the comic opera (yes some operas are comedies!) The Barber of Seville is a joy to hear, all 45 minutes of it. His lectures are interspersed with short recordings from the opera itself.

This recording is available from Amazon.

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Edward Wolfe

Edward Wolfe has been a fan of Christian apologetics since his teenage years, when he began seriously to question the truth of the Bible and the reality of Jesus. About twenty years ago, he started noticing that Christian evidences roughly fell into five categories, the five featured on this website.
Although much of his professional life has been in Christian circles (12 years on the faculties of Pacific Christian College, now a part of Hope International University, and Manhattan Christian College and also 12 years at First Christian Church of Tempe), much of his professional life has been in public institutions (4 years at the University of Colorado and 19 years at Tempe Preparatory Academy).
His formal academic preparation has been in the field of music. His bachelor degree was in Church Music with a minor in Bible where he studied with Roger Koerner, Sue Magnusson, Russel Squire, and John Rowe; his master’s was in Choral Conducting where he studied with Howard Swan, Gordon Paine, and Roger Ardrey; and his doctorate was in Piano Performance, Pedagogy, and Literature, where he also studied group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and Gestalt theory with Guy Duckworth.
He and his wife Louise have four grown children and six grandchildren.

https://WolfeMusicEd.com
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