The Brooklyn Rail

Peter Sellars, an American theater director known for his controversial productions of famous operas, made his 1990 film of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a Blaxploitation-style movie set in Spanish Harlem. The film is meant to be shocking. Don Giovanni is a pimp, Donna Anna is a heroin addict, and the overture features a dire scene of dogs scavenging for food. There is rape, abuse, gun violence. Mozart’s dramma giocoso [comedic drama], in Sellars’s hands, isn’t giocoso, really at all.

Sellars’s genre-bending comes through in his language choices, too. His version of the servant Leporello’s “Catalogue Aria,” for example, which lists Don Giovanni’s sexual exploits in number (640 Italians! 1003 Spaniards!) and in kind (thin and fat! commoners and princesses!), takes a jarring turn. The line “Sua passion predominante / È la giovin principiante,” which translates literally as “His greatest passion / Is the young first-timer,” flashes across Sellars’s subtitles as something more specific: “But the ones he likes best are the twelve-year-olds.” Here Don Giovanni, according to Leporello’s little black book, is not just a womanizer: he’s a pedophile. Whereas most settings of this aria try for audience laughs, Sellars’s makes it nearly impossible, ethically and socially, to give a chuckle. This aria, and this Don Giovanni more generally, forces audiences to grapple with things that were once considered funny but might not—or shouldn’t—be anymore.

Mozart’s Italian operas (Le Nozze di Figaro [1786], Don Giovanni [1787], and Così fan tutte [1790]) all have a similar comedy problem. They all feature exploitation and abuse to comedic effect, all make jokes that today would be considered sexist, ageist, racist, and ableist. The premise of Così fan tutte is that women are inconstant and unfaithful. If we were to use the title’s English translation, rather than the original Italian, the opera might be much less popular than it is: “All women act the same” is a cringe-worthy declaration that would doubtless rub some audience members, as well as donors, the wrong way—particularly in the United States.

This problem is not specific to Mozart, nor to his Italian librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Much of the humor that drives the operas, and the comedic Italian opera tradition of the eighteenth century more broadly, comes from the commedia dell’arte, the improvised Italian theatrical form that flourished between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The commedia dell’arte hinged on archetypal gestures and tropes that delineated the relationships between social classes, sexes, and regional identities; its jokes, performed as slapstick bits, often centered on difference. There were bits about hungry servants, about illness and hypochondria, about funny foreign accents. And there were endless bits about women, sex, and gender roles.

By the time of Mozart’s operas, the commedia dell’arte had essentially died out: tastes shifted over the course of the eighteenth century, and the comedy of the Italian tradition no longer landed the same way. Still, commedia dell’arte imprinted its humor of difference onto future generations of comedy. Opera buffa, the Italian comedic opera genre that took hold of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, was derived from the commedia dell’arte. Italian was already a dominant operatic language in Europe; with opera buffa, Italy’s theatrical past made a stylistic imprint as well. Mozart, Da Ponte, and countless other composers and librettists (both Italian and non-Italian) drew inspiration from the gestures of early modern Italian comedy.

Don Giovanni shows this imprint clearly—not least because the opera is based on a long tradition of Don Juan commedia productions. Leporello’s “Catalogue Aria” itself comes from a late seventeenth-century Neapolitan commedia sketch entitled Il convitato di pietra [The stone guest]. The comic scene went through many iterations through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Domenico Biancolelli, a famed commedia actor in Paris, apparently threw the infamous catalogue to the audience so that they could inspect it for the names of local women.

This kind of comedic flourish, or some version of it, would likely get laughs in today’s opera houses, too. It’s hard not to laugh at this aria; even Mozart’s musical setting seems tickled, with exuberant flourishes in the flute, bassoon, and violin lines after each mention of groups of women.

It’s also hard not to get swept up in the aria’s beauty, with its soaring melodic line and sweet chord progressions. Listeners aren’t the only ones affected by the music: Leporello himself seems so moved in the end that he stops singing for a bar and lets the instrumental line carry the melody. He doesn’t even seem to remember the subject (or many objects) of his song.

Perhaps this is why Mozart’s Italian operas are still so digestible today—their tempering of a bawdy, bygone commedia dell’arte style with the musically sublime. And so we find ourselves sometimes laughing at jokes that might not be that funny anymore, or singing along with the intoxicating tonalities of womanizers and their enabling servants, even when they are dressed as pimps.