Craig Wright's Yale course Listening to Music takes up melody in this lecture, asking what makes a tune beautiful rather than merely functional. Wright works through three opera excerpts to test the question: Puccini's Gianni Schicchi for cadences and melodic sequences, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the long ascending and descending lines that build tension, and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro for how sequence and phrase repetition shape a memorable theme. He grounds the discussion in classical phrase structure and harmonic progression, showing how each composer's choices follow or bend those foundations to different expressive ends. Recorded in Fall 2008 as part of Yale's open Listening to Music course, the lecture runs about 48 minutes and assumes only basic musical literacy, walking listeners through the scores and recordings chapter by chapter from opening question to detailed analysis of all three works.