Diabolically Fun Opera Trivia at Seattle University

Congratulations to Warren Moskowitz, opera trivia champ Tuesday night at Opera InQUIZitive, our FREE Adult Education and Trivia series hosted at Seattle University! This week’s theme was The Devil & Friends, and Warren proved that he knows much—maybe too much?—about diabolical operatic baddies such as Méphistophélès, Iago, Hagen, and Carmen.

Opera InQUIZitive offers an exploration of music and myth, with plenty of fun and games to boot! Jonathan Dean, author of Seattle Opera’s supertitles and Spotlight Guides, and Tony Kay, critic, trivia master, and NW champion film fanatic, will lead inquisitive minds through a series of mythic archetypes, ranging from beloved operas to pop culture, with nightly trivia games such as “What’s My Line,” “Wait, Wait...Don’t Tell Me” and “Jeopardy.”

At this week’s Opera InQUIZitive, we hunted down archetypes of the Devil, from the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan in the book of Job, through such operas as Das Rheingold, Salome, and Porgy and Bess, plus such pop culture devils as a 1938 Donald Duck cartoon, the Charlie Daniels Band’s 1979 country/pop crossover hit tune “The Devil Rides a Fiddlestick,” and cinematic devils including Robert DeNiro (as Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart) and Tim Curry (as Darkness in Legend).

Join us at upcoming nights of Opera InQUIZitive:

November 18: The Tyrant – Scarpia and Worse
December 16: The Hero’s Quest
January 27, 2015: The Diva Goddess
February 24: God, King, and Father
March 24: The Clown – from Arlecchino to Zerbinetta
April 28: Donna Abandonnata– Ariadne and Her Sisters
May 26: The Musician

Presented in the Wyckoff Auditorium in the Bannan Center for Science & Engineering on the Seattle University campus, Thursday evenings from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

Image: Still from Häxan, a 1922 silent Swedish documentary about witchcraft, re-released in 1968 with voice-over narration by William S. Burroughs.