Don Giovanni Blog
Last week my classmates and I took a trip to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The experience was interesting to say the least. The thing that struck me when I first arrived at the Met were the people dressed up so nicely. Although I did expect people to be dresses half-way decent, I did not expect to see people in suites and other clothing items that are deemed fancy. Another thing that stood out to me at the Met was the red carpeted stairs, they seemed so elegant and almost felt out of place in New York City. We think of New York as such a rough and tumble, hardnosed town that something as simple as stairs help to transport us to a more elegant time. The show started pretty much how I expected with the rape of Anna and the killing of her father by Don Giovanni. The way the show progressed was a surprise to me, I didn’t believe that all the people Don Giovanni wronged would meet and try to collectively bring him down. The scene that confused me the most in the opera was when Leporello disguised himself as Don Giovanni, and vice versa. I know this may sound stupid, but the entire time it was bugging me how nobody noticed that the two had just switched clothes. Also their voices are completely different. I found the translators on the seats very helpful, but at some points kind of awkward. Since the opera is sung in Italian and I read it translated into English the lyrics sometimes don’t seem to match up sometimes. What I mean is the words in Italian sound good together, but in English they don’t rhyme. Here in America in modern times we are so used to hearing songs with lyrics that rhyme that any deviation from this just doesn’t make any sense. One last thing that stuck me a bit about this opera was the emphasis put on the singing in the opera. Although obviously a main part of the show is the singing, it isn’t necessarily the only proponent of the show. There is also a component of the show that entails the singers act too. Not only did I find the acting rather subpar, but I also felt the writing wasn’t very good. Again this is probably the fact this opera was written over 215 years ago and tastes were different then.