My Improvement on the Almost Perfect Opera: Mozart’s and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni.
Before coming to United States, and Teaching Italian at what eventually would become Columbia University, a brilliant Italian, Lorenzo Da Ponte, wrote a great script for Mozart,
Having studied at Columbia myself, I feel it is my duty to continue the glorious tradition of Da Ponte. Consequently, here is my new updated version.
Characters:
Don Giovanni (DG). Well-positioned White Liberal who is wealthy, well connected, good with words, and the winner of Rhodes Scholarship.
Donna Anna. A beautiful girl, who’s poor parents had forced her to marry a rich conservative General.
The General. Donna Anna’s husband, whom Don Giovanni drove to suicide by accusing him in violations all the Politically Correct Codes at all the enterprises and factories that he owned.
Leporello: DG’s friend. Editor of the Progressive Newspaper. Publishes all sorts of denunciations, that DG – feeds him. All the sordid stories from the lives of rich and famous that DG could find and decided to use.
Zerlina. Naïve black girl, whom DG tries to seduce by presenting himself as the champion of all poor, and underprivileged. “I share you pain”: The line that he found irresistible especially with young girls of minority background.
Masetto. Zerlina’s boyfriend.
Here is just one scene to give you the taste of this stunning sequel that promises to upstage Mozart, once the operas are allowed to be staged again:
DG organizes a party at his Hampton Estate, invites there Zerlina with her boyfriend. He impresses them with his stellar record of exposing racism, and mentions the story of a General, whom he and his friend, Leporello, exposed as the vicious abuser.
Awe-struck by his record, Zerlina and Mazotto attend the party, where they see all sorts of colorful characters. Plenty of wine and nudity and all other things needed to jack up the ratings, follow. DG gets Mazotto drunk and indisposed, and invites Zerlina to see his collection of Africans teas, that he exports to Paris’s chic store, that gives work to poor collective in some distant land of inner Mali. Unsuspected Zerlina follows him, and he begins to weinstein her. She, being a strong girl, pushes him away and jumps out of the window, DG pursues, but to no avail. Zerlina escapes.
Frustrated DG, takes a walk, and wonders through the city’s Cemetery. There, he sees the sculpture of the General, and Donna Anna, kneeling in front of him. She still feels bad about her former husband, even after his lurid past had been exposed by DG and Leporello. So the angry and frustrated DG, sings his famous area about “treacherous women” who could never remain faithful to him -- something in the style of "La Donna E Mobile," and then invites a crowd of angry young men from the poor part of town whom he incites them to destroy the sculpture.
While they are crushing the General's monument, DG announces to the sculpture: I outsmarted you in life, and now I am cheating you in your post-life existence as a stone slab. But maybe, some of the rocks from your sculpture can be used for my new bedroom, where I am planning to have my way with your wife, and everyone else. So please, don’t be greedy, let me put some of these rocks to good use.
DG invites Donna Anna to his house, promising to give her some letters that the General wrote to him, when they were still friends at Andover. He wines and dines her, telling her all sorts of wonderful stories about his heroic past. Unfortunately, at that moment, a ghost of the General’s Monument appears. DG is not afraid. He gives the ghost his hand, and they both of them fall through the floor.
The curtain falls while the music is blasting something reminiscent of Gunod’s famous area Le Veau D’or with the refrain:. “
Au bruit sombre des écus,
Dansent une ronde folle
Autour de son piédestal!…
Et PC conduit le bal!
Original French had "Satan," but I'd rather not mention his name in vain. So PC is my modern equivalent.
