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PARTISANREVIEW
a past work into the present, and places it in the context of the inter–
preter's experience. But only a solipsist or a paranoiac really believes that
all utterances refer to himsel£ That belief not only distorts meaning, it
also deprives the person holding it of knowledge about the world out–
side of himsel( Mozart is at best a distorted mirror of the present. He
speaks much more clearly about his own era.
While the concept of "period production" is far more problematic
than any of Sellars's critics, in their rage, have acknowledged, at its core
is the effort to bring forth from a work that which is specific to its time.
Whether that realization occurs on a bare stage or in an elaborately ap–
pointed boudoir is less important than the intention behind it. The late
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's productions of Monteverdi and Mozart were
fir
from literal recreations of Baroque palaces or of contemporary theater
sets, and they used movements at times more explicitly erotic than any–
thing Sellars has essayed. Yet they captured the passion and the artifice of
the Baroque sensibility with a rare brilliance.
The barriers to understanding the past have been rehearsed ad nau–
seum by modern philosophers oflanguage. But just because we
will
never
perfectly capture Mozart's intentions or produce the definitive
Don
Gio–
vanni
does not mean that the effort to do so is a worthless one. Our de–
sire
to
transcend the self in search of the other makes us human. This
humanist search for understanding is a far cry from the multiculturalist
cult of"difference," which ultimately uses difference as a wedge to drive
people apart. It also leads in a different direction from Sellars's attempts
to turn Mozart into a critic of late twentieth century society.
Though Sellars wants to show the continuity between Mozart's
world and ours, his productions constantly remind us of how different
those two worlds really are. Whatever Sellars may have gained by hi–
jacking Mozart into the twentieth century was far outweighed by what
was lost. What was lost was the opportunity to imagine our way into
the past, into a world in whose ideals we have lost faith.
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