The Camping Up of Mozart Or, Yo, Don Giovanni is one bad dude

By Otto Friedrich

The trademarks of a Peter Sellars production are that it's fresh, different, full of gags and surprises. Sellars did The Mikado with a character vrooming around on a motorcycle, and he set Handel's Orlando at the Kennedy Space Center. But a question remains: Do the elegant and aristocratic operas of Mozart really need to be jazzed up, gagged up, camped up and wrestled into the postmodern age?

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 fan tutte (1790) in a sleazy diner called Despina's. Nor does the Sellars game end ) there. At 31, the aging enfant terrible is talking of deconstructing Idomeneo in Brussels and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne.

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 ourselves in new ways as well. And at the very least they create talk and controversy. In the case of Sellars' Mozart, unfortunately, that is about all they create.

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 between them. Thus in the famous scene in which the two switch costumes so that the servant can court one of his master's ladies, Sellars' twins make a meaningless exchange of their leather jackets.

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 East Harlem hoodlum, the character no longer fits the plot, so Sellars blithely begins changing various details of the story.

"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 English, but Sellars characteristically prefers that Da Ponte's witty text remain obscure, that "the audience ((be)) forced to take in information through other pores."

Just as Sellars' transfer of Don Giovanni to a phantasmagorical Spanish Harlem really tells us very little about Harlem, it also tells us nothing new about Don Giovanni. There have been so many changes in plot and character that Giovanni is no longer Mozart's defiant hero but a quite different and less interesting character of Sellars' creation. In the intensely dramatic finale, for example, he is not dragged unrepentant to hell by the statue of the man he murdered but rather led there, while groveling in his underwear, by a young girl in what looks like a Communion dress.

Mozart wanted even his darkest operas to end with the characters reconciled and order restored, and so he followed the fiery disappearance of Don Giovanni with a cheery little sextet in which the survivors tell everyone to mend his ways. Sellars' contemporary sensibility seems unable to accept such a stylized ending, and so he attributes the sextet not to the survivors of the disaster but to the suffering ghosts of those same survivors.

This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives from a rather cruel bet: two young men agree to adopt disguises and try to seduce each other's fiancees. Alas, it proves all too easy, but after a reasonable amount of tears and outcries, everyone is reconciled at the end. Not in Sellars' version. Here they finish in an angry brawl, and according to Sellars, "the opera ends as they scream the words 'beautiful calm' against gale-force turbulence in the orchestra."

This orchestra, like Sellars' repertory company of gifted young singers, performs admirably under the deft and scrupulous conducting of Craig Smith, and so it is a pleasure to find that Sellars has pretty much left the performers alone in one of the three operas, Figaro. The setting in the Trump Tower is no more than a mild gag, not another excuse for wholesale Sellarsization. Donald Trump does not appear from behind a bush. The singers just sing, and sing beautifully. What a relief!