Don Giovanni Post, Courtney

To consider the question of transport in regards to Don Giovanni, I would like to consider two of the male characters within the opera: Leporello and Don Giovanni. From the first two scenes in the play, the seduction of Donna Anna and the murder of her father, I found the contrast in the acting styles of the two men to be extreme. Leporello was the comedian and was good at it. He played a slapstick, bumbling character that seemed humanly awkward. Don Giovanni, by contrast, played his character in a highly stylized manner, constantly waving his arms about in grand professions of love and vanity. He played the idea of grand desire as opposed to the actual human experience of it. This seems to be an instance of Levin’s concept of the unsettling of opera—the possibility for wildly divergent acting styles to be placed side by side. What was especially interesting to me in this divergence though, was the way that acting style highlighted or overtook the centrality of the voice of the opera singer. In the case of Leporello, I found myself focusing on his acting and paying less attention to the qualities of his voice. With Don Giovanni I found the opposite to be true, because his acting was so stylized I was able to see him as an “opera singer” and attune myself to the quality of his voice. I admit that I am not an opera aficionado, and so there is a possibility that this may partially be attributable to the actual quality of the singer’s voice. Yet whether or not Don Giovanni was actually a more skilled singer or not, his acting style had a direct impact on the way I heard his voice.

Leporello was able to transport me and Don Giovanni was not, yet I find myself unable to say which is better for the aims of the opera. This brought me to the question: what do we mean when we say someone is a good actor, when someone plays his role well? Is voice a part of acting within the opera? Outside of the opera, I would not hesitate to say that voice is an integral part of acting, and so why would this be any different for the opera? In this case though, I find that neither is better or worse, but instead that they are evidence of different goals or aims of the opera singer, and I find it fascinating that they are able to coexist onstage without a total breakdown of the opera itself. Thus, transport, for me, was not a totalizing experience but could be had alongside theatricality (in Davis’s definition of the word).