About Your Instructor
Denise Gallo is a specialist in nineteenth-century Italian opera. Formerly an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Music History Division at The Catholic University of America, she holds a doctorate in Historical Musicology. Active in arts education, she is a frequent lecturer for Washington Opera, the Baltimore Opera Company, Washington Concert Opera, the Smithsonian Associates, and Summer Opera Theatre Company. In 2006, she was a featured lecturer for the Metropolitan Opera Education Series. An active scholar, she presents her research at national and international musicological conferences. Her book, Opera: The Basics, was published in 2006 by Routledge. Other publications include a book on Rossini and a chapter on the libretto of Verdi’s Falstaff for The Verdi Sourcebook (Toccata Press). She is also preparing the volume of banda music for the Critical Edition of the Works of Gioachino Rossini, to be published by Bärenreiter Press in 2008 and is at work on a book entitled Walt Whitman and Music: “I and my recitatives.” Gallo is one of the senior music specialists at the Library of Congress, and has previously instructed an OPERA America Online Learning course on Rossini’s La Cenerentola.

About Your Instructor
Andrew Eggert is a freelance opera director based in New York City. In the 2008-2009 season, he will direct new productions of La Tragédie de Carmen at Chicago Opera Theater, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at Princeton University, and scenes from Cavalli operas for the Yale Baroque Opera Project. At Glimmerglass Opera, he has worked as assistant director of several new productions and as staff stage director of the Young American Artists Program. He has been a regular guest director at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts and recently staged several Mozart duets for the Apprentice Scenes Program at Santa Fe Opera. Eggert is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied English with an emphasis on dramatic literature and is currently pursuing graduate work in the Music Department of Columbia University.

About Your Instructor
Scott Eyerly is a composer and teacher living in New York, where his Juilliard course “Desert Island Opera” has proven a popular introduction to the genre. Eyerly is also a frequent lecturer at Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington, Massachusetts where he introduces the Met HD broadcasts. The world premiere of his opera The House of the Seven Gables was produced by Manhattan School of Music and is now available on an Albany double CD. Eyerly’s other works include commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, Glimmerglass Opera, Chamber Music America, Cape May (NJ) Music Festival, the New York Youth Symphony and Philip Morris Companies Inc. In May 2009, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue will give the premiere of his choral and organ work Spires, a celebration of churches and sacred spaces.

About Your Instructor
Thomas May is the author of the guide to Wagner and his works, Decoding Wagner, An Invitation to His World of Music Drama (2004), and The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer (2006), both published by Amadeus Press. He is a former Fulbright scholar and contributes to programs for leading opera companies and symphonies around the country. May also lectures and contributes to Opera Now, crosscut.com, and many other arts publications, and has previously instructed an OPERA America Online Learning course on John Adams’s Nixon in China. Before settling in Seattle, May was a freelance critic for The Washington Post.