Word: sellarsization
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The question now arises at the Pepsico Summerfare festival in Purchase, N.Y., where Sellars' versions of the three operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte are all being restaged. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is set in Manhattan's Trump Tower, Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem and Cosi...
In theory, nobody should object to any adventurous director's attempting to modernize the tradition-encrusted masterpieces of opera. At best such 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...
By some bit of ingenuity and/or luck, Sellars discovered two talented young identical twins, Eugene and Herbert Perry, and cast them as Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello. This provides all kinds of ironies on the brotherhood of master and man, but it also obliterates the no less important differences...
That scene illustrates a more fundamental problem. Don Giovanni is at least partly a drama of class distinctions. That is why, for example, the cavalier can simply walk in on the wedding of the peasant Masetto and walk off with his bride Zerlina. When Don Giovanni is converted into an...
"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...