Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 86

82

Popular Culture Review

contact between the Commander and the protagonist, Sellars minimizes the
importance of this confrontation. Instead, a young blond girl acts as intermediary.
She slowly approaches and extends her hand to don Giovanni. As he accepts her
hand, he is drawn into hell.
This handshake is a macabre reversal of don Giovanni’s sexual exploits.
In the catalog aria Leporello informed Elvira that don Giovanni had a preference
for very young virgins. Sellars ends the opera with an inversion in the roles of
victim and victimizer. One of don Giovanni’s potential victims, a young towhead,
seduces him to hell. Sellars, then, downplays the supernatural and adds social and
racial implications to don Giovanni’s damnation. While for some, this preadolescent
represents the hopes and salvation of the nation, for don Giovanni, she embodies
despair and damnation. If don Giovanni’s previous encounters evened up some
racial or classist score, this final scene presents strong visual evidence that the
hierarchy remains in place. A young white girl casts the black don Giovanni to
hell. In keeping with the structural tradition of both the Golden Age don Juan and
eighteenth-century Don Giovanni, order has once again been restored.
Sellars’s Don Giovanni caused something of a stir in operatic circles.
Heather Mac Donald cites the Filet-0-Fish(D scene as a prime example of how
Sellars has defiled Mozart’s music and DaPonte’s libretto (710). This reception
bears on several concerns related specifically to don Juan and generally to the
study of literature. The first entails intertextuality, inherent to any don Juan story.
Mac Donald’s reaction would be more defensible if Mozart and DaPonte had been
the first to create don Juan as we know him today. Nevertheless, don Juan texts can
not exist as separate and discrete units. By naming any protagonist don Juan, or its
equivalent in another language, an artist openly acknowledges a creative debt. To
dismiss Sellars’s Don Giovanni because it is not faithful to Mozart ignores the
dialog that exists between all versions of the story. Each don Juan simultaneously
asserts a dependence on and independence from its predecessors, thereby
exemplifying the pattern so clearly described by Bloom, Worton, Still and others.
Seen in this intertextual continuum, Mozart was just as irreverent to Tirso’s
or Moliere’s plays as Sellars was to Mozart’s opera. One could easily balk at the
required suspension of disbelief when confronted with the number of Don
Giovanni *s seductions or the several scenes in which Leporello replaces his master.
Neither Tirso’s trickster nor Moliere’s libertine deflowers thousands of women;
Catalinon and Sganarelle do not look like their masters. By comparison, Don
Giovanni's excesses and inverisimilitudes are too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
In their respective historical and artistic settings, the catalog aria and mistaken
identities of Mozart’s opera are as outrageous as the Filet-O-Fish® and the drug
scenes of Sellars’s Don Giovanni.