Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation of the greatest of all Don Juan stories and perhaps the greatest of all operas, Mozart's Don Giovanni...
...made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend and the setting of Mozart's opera is not Italy but Spain. The real problem is that in taking the work...
...Mozart and Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte created an enormously alluring, vital protagonist who pursues his appetites with cheerful disregard for law or morality. After forcing himself on a noblewoman, Donna Anna, he duels with her father, the Commendatore, and kills him. Then, while the Don busies himself mostly with trying to seduce the peasant girl Zerlina, Donna Anna joins forces with her fiancé Don Ottavio and another of the Don's conquests, Donna Elvira, to hound him through a series of comic entanglements, disguises and escapes. When a statue of the slain Commendatore comes to life and challenges...
...Mozart's great finale, the statue arrives at the Don's supper as an agent of divine retribution. But there is no room for theology, or even for the supernatural, in the class struggle. Losey, after underplaying the hair-raising moment when the statue first speaks, dissipates its horrific arrival by treating it almost as a hallucination. Then, in one of his most bizarre touches, a glass blower's open furnace-first seen during the overture-materializes once again in the Don's house and engulfs him, in a sort of industrial accident. Don Giovanni does...
...extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but José Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness. Missing...