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| | Arts Calendar / March 5 / Opera |
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19:00 | Don Giovanni Ossia Il Dissoluto Punito |
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 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera in two acts, 195 min. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Sung in Italian. Stage Director: Boris Pokrovsky. Music Director: Lev Ossovsky. The opera was commissioned as a result of the overwhelming success of Mozart's trip to Prague in January and February 1787. The subject matter may have been chosen in consideration of the long history of Don Juan operas in Prague; the genre of eighteenth-century Don Juan opera originated in Prague. The libretto of Lorenzo Da Ponte was based closely on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati for the opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, first performed in Venice early in 1787, although he was loath to admit this in memoirs written decades later. Some of the most important elements that he copied were the idea of opening the drama with the murder of the Commendatore (in earlier dramas, this incident always appeared somewhere in the middle) and the lack of a specification of Seville as the setting, which had been customary in the tradition of Don Juan dramas since the appearance of the prototype Don Juan drama El burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina, written in the early 17th century. For Bertati, the setting was Villena, Spain, whereas Da Ponte's libretto only specifies a "city in Spain". According to some sources, Giacomo Casanova assisted in the writing.
Boris Pokrovsky Chamber Stage  |
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