Word: opera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prettiest thing about Meryl in those days was her singing voice. A promising coloratura soprano, she began taking lessons in New York with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling. "The first opera I went to," recalls Meryl, "was Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove, with Beverly Sills. It was incredible to see her onstage. Until then, I thought she was just a nice lady who had the lesson before me." One morning Meryl got up, squashed her glasses underfoot, put peroxide and lemon juice on her hair and set out to be "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout." Boys quickly...
...middle-aged, thin-lipped, white-faced sadist, a man more easily pictured flogging cats than seducing women. Raimondi fits in well with Losey's class-conscious interpretation of Da Ponte's 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...
Those subtitles give this Don Giovanni a great advantage over live opera, but pose a danger as well. By offering an instant, easily consulted libretto, they restore to the recitative sections the cynical bite normally lost on English-speaking audiences. Future directors. though, would do well to find themselves better translators than Losey's. As the spirits of hell clamor for the Don's soul, for example, he shouts, "They agitate my viscera...
...SPECIFIC FLAWS of this Don Giovanni will certainly prevent it from bringing opera to a mass audience, and--despite all that film offers opera listeners, financially and technically--it's doubtful the opera movie will ever go over big. Audiences today have trouble sitting through the two-and-a-half hour extravagant spectacle of Apocalypse Now; Losey's three hours of set pieces won't fare any better...
...people who will go see Losey's film are the same people who buy seats for the Metropolitan Opera when it visits Boston each spring, not the great unwashed "masses" who couldn't care less about opera, who would rather see the latest Airport movie than Don Giovanni--or, better yet, go home and turn on the television. To "Mork and Mindy...