Don Giovanni

So here's your task: without getting too impressionistic, talk about any transport wrought by Don Giovanni. How does opera overcome its structuring and patent artifice? Can it/does it/should it make you feel the way Cavell does for Desdemona? How, exactly, does it impact you?

I had been forewarned by a friend in the musicology program that the director of this production made some distinctly misogynistic choices in the overture. I was unsure of what she meant, seeing as the overture is what it is, but upon seeing the staging it made sense. The director chose to make Donna Anna a liar, a girl-who-cries-rape, as opposed to the more open-ended reading of the libretto. This direction continued throughout, with every woman who was angered at Don Giovanni still very willing to feel him up and generally only regretting his lack of monogamy. [Mis]interpreting the libretto in this way makes it very strange to see Don Giovanni pulled to Hell, since his only crime was murder, but that murder took place during a duel and thusly is at least somewhat socially acceptable.

Of course, I am not writing this post to give a review of the direction. This introduction was necessary, however, to explain the sense of hyperbole and transport I felt from the mirrored backdrop on the stage. My first thought was, why does the virginal Donna Anna have a mirrored bedroom better  fitted, perhaps, to a Venetian bordello. I then realized, the only character who truly utilized the mirror was Don Giovanni himself. I thought, "Oh my, the mirror isn't real, it is a reflection of Don Giovanni's world-view, that everything exists to serve his pleasure, to reflect back to him whatever he desires the world to be.

This is perhaps the closest I came to any transport during this production, because it took me to an entirely separate interpretive mindset. After I had the mirror thought, Don Giovanni became an unreliable narrator. Does he truly seduce women, or is this just how he chooses to see his actions? This meta-narrative of sociopath narcissism that I created in my head thanks to the mirrors took the opera, at least for brief spurts, beyond the artifice of the broadly comic, often cliche performance and rewrote the presented story, from that of a indefinably and undeniably sexually attracted Lothario, to that of a self-centered, possibly insane aristocrat.