Jessica Waldoff
Carol and Park B. Smith Professor of Music, Music Department Chair, Director of Academics, Graduate Studies Advisor, Study Abroad Advisor
Biography
Jessica Waldoff is the Carol and Park B. Smith Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music. She specializes in European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a research focus on questions of dramaturgy and representation in vocal music, especially opera. She is the author of Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (Oxford, 2006; 2011), which draws on a broad base of critical thought from Aristotle to Terence Cave to explore the essential role recognition and discoveries of knowledge play in Mozart’s operas. Multiple reviews praise the author for “her ability to open up operatic vistas through the lens of literary studies” (Opera Quarterly), and the book as “probing” (The New Yorker), “meticulously devised” (Eighteenth Century Music), and “stimulating fresh insight into Mozart’s operas” (Music & Letters). Her edited book, The Cambridge Companion to “The Magic Flute” (Cambridge, 2023) includes twenty-one essays by leading scholars and offers a range of new perspectives on key issues, including the opera’s representation of exoticism, race, and gender. Reviews praise the volume as: a “kaleidoscope” of essays that “offer complementary perspectives on the opera, and in their interplay, gradually shape a multifaceted understanding of it” (Eighteenth-Century Music); a collection that, “mirroring the work ‘itself,’ … should enlighten and perhaps yet Enlighten all” (Music & Letters); and a “fascinating, occasionally provocative and (mostly) accessible companion for anyone seeking Singspiel enlightenment” (Gramophone).
Professor Waldoff has also published widely on the music of Mozart and Haydn in journals and books, including essays in Mozart in Context (Cambridge, 2019), Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism (Cambridge, 2012), Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative—Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (Peter Lang, 2009), Mozart Studies (Cambridge, 2006), The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (Cambridge, 2006), Haydn Studies (Cambridge, 1998), Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (Cambridge, 1997), Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on his Life and his Music (Oxford, 1996), and elsewhere. Her most recent essay on Mozart’s Da Ponte operas will appear in Mozart and His World, edited by Simon P. Keefe (The University of Chicago Press, 2026).
She is committed to public musicology and has written essays for a number of renowned opera houses and festivals including, among others, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden (London), La Monnaie (Brussels), the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona), the Cleveland Orchestra’s Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Salzburg Music Festival. She has also lectured widely both in the United States and abroad. Most recently, she is engaged to speak at the Bard Music Festival in the summer of 2026.
She began playing violin at age seven and was focused mainly on performance until she discovered the field of musicology at Amherst College, where she majored in Music and English. Following graduation, she was awarded a five-year Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to support graduate study, which she brought to Cornell University where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. While pursuing her doctoral work, she was the recipient of several other awards, including Cornell’s Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.
During her tenure at Holy Cross, Professor Waldoff has taught a wide variety of courses including the History of Western Music sequence, Song Through the Ages, Introduction to Music, as well as seminars such as Mozart and His World, Beethoven and His World, and Women, Music, and Society. She has served the Department of Music in various administrative capacities, including as Department Chair, Graduate Studies Advisor, Study Abroad Advisor, and Director of Academics. She has brought many distinguished scholars and performers to campus, travelled internationally with the College Choirs, and developed and grown many of our programs in music. She is a past President of the Mozart Society of America and has served on boards and committees for the American Musicological Society, Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music, the Haydn Society of North America, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, among others. In 2007, Holy Cross awarded her the Mary Louise Marfuggi Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship.