Word: giovanni
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...question now arises at the Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., where Sellars' versions of the three operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte are all being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne...
...some bit of ingenuity and/or luck, Sellars discovered two talented young identical twins, Eugene and Herbert Perry, and cast them as Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello. This provides all kinds of ironies on the brotherhood of master and man, but it also obliterates the no less important differences between them. Thus in the famous scene in which the two switch costumes so that the servant can court one of his master's ladies, Sellars' twins make a meaningless exchange of their leather jackets...
That scene illustrates a more fundamental problem. Don Giovanni is at least partly a drama of class distinctions. That is why, for example, the cavalier can simply walk in on the wedding of the peasant Masetto and walk off with his bride Zerlina. When Don Giovanni is converted into an East Harlem hoodlum, the character no longer fits the plot, so Sellars blithely begins changing various details of the story...
...shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but their reveries about past and present, nature and culture, memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from the '60s to the '80s, such as the richly metaphoric sculptures of Giovanni Anselmo or even (more distantly) the structures of Mario Merz...
...world of music noisily opened fire in support of Barenboim. Jessye Norman, the stately Georgia-born soprano, said she would "reconsider" whether to sing in the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution. Patrice Chereau, who was to stage a new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni on opening night a year from now, said he considered his contract "annulled by this event." Conductor-composer Pierre Boulez resigned as vice president of the organization in charge of Parisian opera. Zubin Mehta of the New York Philharmonic said, "I will not go there under these circumstances." Herbert von Karajan...