Word: mozarts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mozart wanted even his darkest operas to end with the characters reconciled and order restored, and so he followed the fiery disappearance of Don Giovanni with a cheery little sextet in which the survivors tell everyone to mend his ways. Sellars' contemporary sensibility seems unable to accept such a stylized ending, and so he attributes the sextet not to the survivors of the disaster but to the suffering ghosts of those same survivors...
...attempts can bring new vitality to works that have become numbingly familiar; they can enable us not only to see an opera in new ways but to see ourselves in new ways as well. And at the very least they create talk and controversy. In the case of Sellars' Mozart, unfortunately, that is about all they create...
...These operas do not require powdered wigs and candelabra to make their political points," says Sellars. True enough, but if Sellars had really wanted to modernize Mozart's opera, his hero should have been a Wall Street arbitrager, or perhaps a rock star. For that matter, he should sing in English, but Sellars characteristically prefers that Da Ponte's witty text remain obscure, that "the audience ((be)) forced to take in information through other pores...
Just as Sellars' transfer of Don Giovanni to a phantasmagorical Spanish Harlem really tells us very little about Harlem, it also tells us nothing new about Don Giovanni. There have been so many changes in plot and character that Giovanni is no longer Mozart's defiant hero but a quite different and less interesting character of Sellars' creation. In the intensely dramatic finale, for example, he is not dragged unrepentant to hell by the statue of the man he murdered but rather led there, while groveling in his underwear, by a young girl in what looks like a Communion dress...
This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives from a rather cruel bet: two young men agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish...