Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Would Shakespeare have approved of Olivier's Hamlet! Would Mozart have liked Joseph Losey's film version of Don Giovanni? Who knows? Who cares...
...violin while he glances woefully at the case at his feet, a felt-covered basin for six quarters, nine dimes and a tribe of pennies. "C'mon folks, if you give a little more, I won't play so badly. I teach at Julliard, really. Here's a little Mozart for you." He stops after four measures, scratches at his cap and uses the bow as a pointer to count the coins in the case. "Thanks folks. More." Outside the glass door, all the limos have gone home...
...best-realized opera film prior to Don Giovanni, neatly sidestepped all the conceptual problems of the hybrid genre--it pretended to be a filmed record of a performance in a provincial opera house, with shots of the audience thrown in to be sure you understood the universality of Mozart's message. Losey never wavers from his no-holds-barred outdoors staging, using the Palladio villas near Vicenza as an occasional refuge from the bright sun that over-exposes many of the scenes...
...fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though the added visual verisimilitude could take some of the burden off the music and let the singers take it easy for a change...
...text--he sees Don Giovanni as the consummate self-indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle to a black-and-white social dialetic. Figaro would have better served such an intent...