Course blog 8 [Jenna] Don Giovanni

Before I begin this blog post, I must admit that I have struggled to find an angle from which to write. Like some of my fellow classmates, I failed to find many, if any, moments of transport during the opera. After reading Levin last week, I can safely say that I did find the opera to be deeply unsettling. The singing was at odds with the staging, which was at odds with the subtitling, which was at odds with the auditorium. (I don’t think the surtitles could have been placed much higher…thankfully I had a seat in the rear of the opera house.) Some characters, like Donna Anna, were presentational while others, like Zerlina, attempted to be representational. In a mob scene, one man possessed two pitchforks while the performer next to him prowled the stage holding only a fan. The set was one in which garden benches appeared in bedrooms and servants could circumvent walls but ghosts could not.  In a world in which the characters sang gorgeous classical music, the performers portraying them utilized extremely contemporary gesture, like in the moment in which Leporello flashed Don Giovanni the bird.  I suppose that all of these elements may have been “unsettling” and aesthetically worthwhile, but I, unpracticed operagoer as I am, only found them to be sloppy.

As I watched Don Giovanni, I was particularly irked by the fact that while the stage had a vast number and variety of entrances, characters inevitably struggled to locate its exits. I lost track of the number of times in which a character seemingly forgot that she had entered a garden through a door two feet to her left while groping about the stage in an attempt to find the same door through which to leave the same garden. I am specifically referring to the scene in which Don Ottavio was singing downstage while Leporello, in an attempt to escape his notice, wandered about upstage with arms cast wide while trying to “feel” his way to a door and Donna Elvira, believing him to be Don Giovanni, stumbled along behind him performing the same gesture. During that moment I, like the man desiring to save Desdemona, wanted nothing more than to leap onstage, give those two some lanterns, and point them toward the nearest wing.

On pages 153-4, Cavell writes, 

“My immobility, my transfixing, rightly attained, is expressed by that sense of awe, always recognized as the response to tragedy. In another word, what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them [the characters]; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.”

While its been removed from its context and placed in my argument, which may not fit its sentiment perfectly well, this quote gave me pause. I don’t believe I have ever felt as separate from the characters onstage as when I longed to intervene in their world and usher them through the garden gate. I was not in awe as Cavell claims we must always be, but I was immobile, transfixed by my inability to correct the problem onstage. Through my perception of them, they were never more present and never more foreign. I may have been frustrated rather than transported, but in my emotional state, I did find unity with the characters through our separateness.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that my preoccupation with my inability to intervene in the opera did not stem from the intense pathos Cavell associates with the disconnection between character and audience. It was partly a selfish desire to prevent the actors from continuing to mime their insufferable game of blind man’s bluff. However, I am captivated by the idea of forging connections through distance rather than empathy. What does it mean to face the character by making them other?