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| | Arts Calendar / October 13 / Opera |
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 Opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 210 min (with intermission). Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Music Director and Conductor: William Lacey. Conductor: Timur Zangiev. Sung in Italian. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart defined the genre of his Don Giovanni as "dramma giocoso", that is, “merry drama”. Unless considered as a term for a specific genre, the phrase is a perfect oxymoron. But the truth is, Don Giovanni has more riddles and contradictions than any other opera. It mixes together fancy and reality, masks and real faces, sensitivity and cold moral admonition. It is hard to understand where one of the oppositions ends and the other begins. Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, his librettist, composed Don Giovanni for the opera’s 1787 premiere performance in Prague. The local audiences were absolutely enraptured with the new Mozart work. However, the next production, in Vienna, was not met with quite such delight. Emperor Joseph II remarked that "Don Giovanni proved above the bend" of his Viennese. He could hardly have guessed that attempts to get to the bottom of Don Giovanni would be endless. Even today, two and a half centuries after the premiere, Mozart’s Don Giovanni remains an unsolved operatic enigma.
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater  |
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