Craig Wright's Yale course Listening to Music turns to opera and the operatic voice in this lecture, pairing analysis of Verdi's La Traviata with a broader discussion of vocal performance practice. Wright walks through the opera's first aria and its scena structure, then shifts to critical assessment of singing itself, using recordings spanning the early to late twentieth century to show how tastes about vocal tone and technique have shifted. Major twentieth and twenty-first century singers, including Pavarotti, Domingo, and Bocelli, serve as case studies for comparing different voice types and performance styles. Recorded in Fall 2008 as part of the introductory Listening to Music survey, the lecture treats La Traviata as a way into larger questions about what audiences and critics have valued in operatic singing over the past century, moving between musical score and recorded performance throughout.