Karen T. Raizen
Karen T. Raizen is an Assistant Professor of Italian and Music at Bard College. Her book Pulcinella’s Brood: Popular Culture in the Enlightenment is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press. She has also edited a volume, Pier Paolo Pasolini Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century, for Bloomsbury Press (2019). She also works as an editor and translator.
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.