I saw Don Giovanni tonight at the Pacific Opera Project. It got me thinking about how long Mozart has until they come for him too as part of #MeToo.
On the one hand, he’s Mozart.
On the other hand, have you ever paid attention to his operas? Beethoven, for example, was scandalized by Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s comic opera Cosi Fan Tutte (All Women Do It).
If Lorenzo Da Ponte were alive today, Brett Ratner would have looked him up and made him a mentor, the way he did with Roman Polanski, Bob Evans, and James Toback: “C’mon, Lorenzo, tell everybody that story about you, Casanova, and the three countesses!”
From The Guardian:
Is opera the most misogynistic art form?
They stab themselves, throw themselves on funeral pyres, go mad and die. From Aida to Lulu, opera is extravagantly cruel to its female characters. Isn’t it t
ime the divas were free to sing to their own tune?
This article demands, at vast length, that women be given more boring roles in operas. Whether or not divas actually want duller roles in which, say,Lucia di Lammermoor doesn’t go mad but instead proves a female role model by successfully presenting the quarterly sales prospects in the North Central Region to the national sales manager (also a woman), is not discussed.
And do divas really want to be free to sing to their own tunes instead of those of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini?
