Wendy Heller

Wendy Beth Heller (born 17 November 1955) is an American musicologist and music editor and the Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton University. A specialist in Italian opera, she focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship connecting music to gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, and dance history, as well as for her work preparing performing editions of baroque opera. She is also known for her work on classical reception in European music.

Early life and education

Heller trained as a classical singer, earning a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory in 1978. She subsequently spent twelve years as cantor and director of music at Congregation Klal Yisrael in Stoughton, Massachusetts, while continuing her musical studies. In recognition of her career, the New England Conservatory named her an honorary alumna in 2003.

At Princeton, Heller served as acting chair of the Department of Music in 2011–12 and as chair from 2015 to 2022.

Opera, gender, and classical reception

Heller's first book, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (University of California Press, 2003), examines how debates over women's chastity, power, and sexuality in seventeenth-century Venice shaped the female characters—historical and mythological—portrayed on the city's operatic stage. One of the first major studies of women in baroque opera, it was a finalist for the American Musicological Society's Otto Kinkeldey Award and won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's annual book prize in 2004.

Along with studies of the music of Cavalli, Handel, Barbara Strozzi, Henry Purcell, and Bach, Heller has also explored the reception of classical antiquity (particularly Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer, and Tacitus) on the early modern operatic stage.

Heller also maintains an active connection to Jewish liturgical music, dating to her years as a cantorial soloist, and has published encyclopedia entries on cantors for the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. She has also served on the executive committee of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and twice chaired its prize committee, and sits on the Venice Research Board of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Sylvan and Pamela C. Coleman Memorial Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010–11) Old Dominion Professorship, Princeton University Council of the Humanities (2014–15) Honorary Alumna, New England Conservatory (2003) Honorary Member, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (2023)

Personal life

Heller lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, with her husband, Jack Hill.

Selected publications

Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Music in the Baroque. Western Music in Context: A Norton History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Anthology for Music in the Baroque. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Staging History: Historical Drama in Britain and America, 1780–1860, edited with Michael Burden, Jonathan Hicks, and Ellen Lockhart. Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016. Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, edited with Eleonora Stoppino. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Barbara Strozzi in Context, edited with Beth Glixon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.