Presidential Lecture "Overlooking the Ephemeral" by Carolyn Abbate

Princeton University Music Historian Carolyn Abbate will deliver the final lecture in the 2004-2005 Presidential and Endowed Lectures in the Humanities and Arts Series. Her lecture is entitled "Overlooking the Ephemeral." A lecture discussion will take place at the Stanford Humanities Center the following day at 4 p.m.

Abbate, a wide-ranging humanist who ranks among the world's foremost authorities on opera, is author of In Search of Opera (2001) and Unsung Voices (1991) and coauthor of the forthcoming The Penguin History of Opera. She is also a translator of French scholarly works, most recently rendering Vladimir Jankélévitch's La Musique et L'Ineffable (1960) as Music and the Ineffable, published in 2003. Abbate's own writings have been translated into French, Italian, and Hebrew.

Abbate has served as a dramaturg at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; she also appears frequently as an intermission commentator on the MET's live radio broad-casts, and as a lecturer there. She has written for The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Stagebill, and Opera News.