Word: mozarts
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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...
...brought something else too. It did not show up on any check list, but it was essential: the ghostly presence of great composers. The repertory for the visit consisted mostly of works passed down through the company's musical heritage directly from those composers' hands. There was Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, premiered in Vienna in 1786 with Mozart himself conducting from the keyboard. There was Beethoven's Fidelio, also first produced in Vienna with the composer presiding, in 1805. From the 20th century there were Salome and Ariadne auf Naxos, the latter premiered...
...crown of the first week's operatic offerings was the Figaro-tender, witty, effortlessly buoyant. The spectacle of servants outwitting their masters, so inflammatory in Mozart's day, was given charm and point by Baritone Walter Berry, as a rather phlegmatic Figaro, and Soprano Lucia Popp, as his pert fiancee. Baritone Hans Helm and especially Soprano Gundula Janowitz, as the count and countess, played along with aristocratic good grace...
Joan Kennedy is a woman whose warmth and charm would have shone in almost any field of life. She has taught in public school and performed a Mozart piano concerto and read Peter and the Wolf with the Boston Symphony. Says one Bostonian who knows her well: "There isn't anyone wanner or dearer, when she's feeling good." But public life has not been kind to Joan Kennedy. Its wounds can be seen in the puffy eyes, the exaggerated makeup, the tales of alcoholism. Today she is a sadly vulnerable soul and an unknown factor...