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"Don Giovanni" Captured: Performance, Media, Myth

Online ISBN:
9780226815428
Print ISBN:
9780226815411
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

"Don Giovanni" Captured: Performance, Media, Myth

Richard Will
Richard Will
University of Virginia
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Published online:
22 September 2022
Published in print:
31 May 2022
Online ISBN:
9780226815428
Print ISBN:
9780226815411
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history evidences an increasing effort on the part of interpreters to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims. “Don Giovanni” Captured analyzes more than a century’s worth of recorded performances of the opera in order to trace the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. In the broadest terms, performance has shifted from mythologizing the title character’s libertinism as an expression of demonic or biological forces, to critiquing it as a psychological or social pathology. At the same time, the sheer quantity of recordings in each decade and their present-day coexistence in the digital cloud highlight the variability of interpretation at any given moment, especially as regards characterization, the representation of time, and the treatment of libertinism’s consequences. The three most common formats for recorded opera were dominant in successive eras: excerpt audio recordings in the first half of the twentieth century, complete audio recordings in the second half, and video recordings in the twenty-first century. Addressing each format in turn, Parts I-III of the book clarify the long-range evolution of Don Giovanni while leaving room to explore competing trends within eras as well as resonances across time and space.

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