710
PARTISAN REVIEW
Trump Tower, where his
Figaro
is set, while lacking the feudal class rules
and the refinement of Count Almaviva's castle, at least does contain
extreme differences of power - purchasing and otherwise - on which
some of
Figaro's
story can indeed be hung. The American ghetto, on the
other hand, is so much the antithesis of Don Giovanni's Seville, and
Sellars's Don Giovanni the antithesis of Mozart's, that the production
seems just plain perverse. It is also a torture to watch. Sellars drags music
of such terrifYing majesty into the gutter. His Don Giovanni can achieve
that character's overwhelming power only by mainlining heroin or
sniffing cocaine; when not high he slips into a morose and sullen
listlessness. He is a boor as well as a depressive. His amusements include
deliberately spitting out a "Big Mac," squeezing ketchup on the
masticated remains, and offering the mess to Leporello, as well as
throwing his french fries at Donna Elvira.
Sellars cannot possibly believe that he has created images in
Don
Giovanni
that complement the music; his intentions must be ironic. But
the direction of his irony is altogether inscrutable. It is impossible to de–
termine whether he intends to unmask the eighteenth century ideal of
nobility, or to decry how far our world has fallen from it.
Cosi Fan Tutte,
by contrast, nearly redeems Sellars's approach. Be–
cause the battle between the sexes is not dependent on the contemporary
class structure, the opera makes the transition to the twentieth century
almost gracefully. While arguably the vibrancy and humor of the
production simply reflect good direction, Sellars may feel that the mod–
ern setting allows a greater scope for zaniness.
The production foregrounds Sellars's greatest strength: his ability to
elicit from his ensemble performances of an emotional intensity unparal–
leled in opera today. Sellars thinks through every emotional detail of an
opera. When, as a member of the theater audience, one is issued one of
his massive handouts retelling each scene according to his own quixotic
interpretation, one wonders whether perhaps he
overthinks
the details. In
Cosi,
however, such directorial intervention pays off. The characters are
bound to each other by forces of attraction and repulsion stronger than
any physical force.
The most questionable aspect of the production is not its modem
setting per se, but rather the decidedly modern angst that hangs over it,
as over all the operas in Sellars's da Ponte cycle. By the second act, the
characters seem to have passed beyond the diner, with its spiffy banquettes
and chrome bar, into the oppressive world of an Edvard Munch paint–
ing. Their life has become unbearable, Mozart's regenerative music
notwithstanding.
Modernizing older works suppresses the frightening possibility that
maybe we can no longer understand the past, and are thus all alone,
