Don Giovanni

Although I'd heard arias from the opera, and even listened to a broadcast of it, I'd never seen it until yesterday. Being able to understand what's going on makes a big difference in appreciation. I hate to admit this, but the music doesn't always give me a good clue as to whether the soprano is out for vengeance, falling in love, or about to kill herself. She's emotional about something, but I don't speak Italian. Perhaps I have to work backwards: cued that she is angry I can learn to look for musical clues.

The show was well done, btw; and the cast managed minor technical glitches with perfect aplomb. The fights suffered the usual problem of having to match the action to the music: if Ottavio really wanted vengeance he'd have done a slash and lunge and the opera would have been over an act too early.

The first time I was introduced to any of the characters was in Shaw's Man and Superman, in the Don Juan in Hell section. Not an endorsement. I reread it last night after 40 years. I was buoyed by remembering that the section was short. The references to a statue confused me then, but I didn't get around to looking it up because there were more plays in the collection and then something else to read, and... The characters, aged by 70 years of heaven, hell and motherhood, debated Shaw's pet notions about Life Force. I prefer Mozart.

At the opera's end the survivors sing of what they will do now, and the twice-gulled Donna Elvira says she will spend her life in a convent. The audience laughed. The segment was supposed to be somewhat comic, but the punch line was the next one, as Zerlina sings that she and her new husband will go home to supper.

Were the characters real I'd not advise Elvira to try for a convent, but within the story her situation is painful enough to demand a little respect for her cry. She has discovered that she can't trust herself to stay away from a man she knows will betray her, and has even tried to, in effect, betray her new friends by asking mercy for a man she knows will try to prey on them. And we laughed at her shame and penitence.