this is my response to a music history lecture i went to that became twice as long as it needed to be about mozart opera don giovanni please enjoy it. i think its kind of interesting :3
CW: discussions of racial violence and sexual assault, mostly glossed over
The lecture I attended discussed the portrayal of the titular Don Giovanni from Mozart’s opera and how his character changes over the past half-century or so, linked to changing attitudes surrounding masculinity and assault. In earlier stagings of the opera, the initial heavy-handed Catholic moral play was quickly satirized, turning Don Giovanni into a dashing or even heroic rake who rails against the unmoving statue of the Commodore–possibly representing fate, or god. As time went on and feminism became a more prevalent concern, however, sexual assault was no longer a light-hearted topic. Don Giovanni’s formerly lush and drawn-out descent into hell is quick and ignominious, befitting a pathetic man asserting power in pathetic ways. In still more modern stagings, Don Giovanni is no longer accountable for his deeds–instead toxic masculinity, or even the Freudian shadow of familial abuse, hangs over him and the whole play. Stagings where the rest of the cast take turns stabbing Don Giovanni, or drive him to madness, ask: Aren’t we all, really, just as bad as Don Giovanni? Aren’t we all complicit? I think this is kind of silly, and not really true.
One staging I found interesting that the lecturer discussed briefly was one where Don Giovanni’s character was represented as a Black drug dealer in the city. His victims (Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, etc) are either rich White women or lower-class Black and Asian women. In the end, what comes for him isn’t in the form of the Commodore, but rather a young White woman; the opera is meant to comment on the fear of Black male sexual aggression against White femininity. I was confused by what this staging was trying to accomplish. Historically, accusations of sexual aggression from Black men have been used by White women as a way of leveraging racial power, regardless of the truth. By having the character in question be Don Giovanni, who really did assault women, it feels as though the opera ends up saying that this fear of Black men is legitimate.
I also appreciated the question posed by one of the teachers attending the lecture: are all of these interpretations and responses surrounding Don Giovanni really just a justification to keep staging it, rather than finding some new music? Is the opera stage, intertwined with class and ideas of Western supremacy as it is, really the best place to try and deconstruct toxic masculinity and rape culture? For the latter question, I think my opinion is that to have the platform and opportunity to do so, if you don’t try to address these topics in some way it is easy–maybe even inevitable–that they are instead being implicitly reinforced. Art dies without social relevance and reinterpretation, and Don Giovanni (and opera as a whole) sustains itself by interfacing with its previous iterations as well as current social topics; but to move onto the other question: does Don Giovanni deserve to live? I do think that a piece that has accrued meaning over time can deliver a message more powerfully than something new–something that doesn’t have the same cultural capital as an opera by Mozart. But in the end, I don’t know :( < this is where i ran out of ideas/steam lmfao
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