Don Giovanni: Not the kind of transport Cavell experienced

I hated Don Giovanni. Almost from the moment I met him, I was anxiously awaiting his death, partly so that I could go home and partly because he disgusted me. Some of that was probably an intended effect of the opera, but a lot of it had to do with the way the female characters were presented and interacted with, and the way that Don Giovanni's behavior was played as an obvious joke.

Things were kind of hard to see from my seat, and I didn't read the program notes before it started, so I wasn't quite sure what was going on during the opening scene. It seemed like Don Giovanni was having an awkward liaison with Donna Anna. Maybe they had a quarrel, because she turns away from him, then calls him back, then he turns away from her, and then wins her back. Then she follows him out into the street and clings to him, and he sings a remark about this one being hard to get rid of or something like that. Then when Donna Anna tells her fiance she was raped, I went back and read the program notes, which said that Don Giovanni seduced her. Yet the libretto and Donna Anna's actions throughout the play seemed to clearly show that Mozart thought it was rape. I was confused and annoyed that the production had muddied that distinction without explanation. Later on, Don Giovanni carries the protesting Zerlina offstage and she cries out, which I saw as a second rape. Between these possible rapes and the general attitude that Don Giovanni was just a very good joke, I was out for his blood.

Cavell described the experience of wanting to save Desdemona and not being able to as an emblem of our separation from each other in the real world. In a dark reversal of Cavell's joke about the yokel, at the end of Act One, I wanted to take the gun from the incompetent would-be assassins onstage and shoot Don Giovanni myself. The etiquette and conventions of the theater created a separateness in hatred just as it did for Cavell in empathy. In the end, even Don Giovanni being dragged down to hell didn't completely satisfy me because the music made it seem like even though he was foolish, he was still brave. The production invited me to admire Don Giovanni even when he was lying to women, even when he lugged them offstage to rape them, even when he brutally kicks Masetto lying on the ground, even when he was dragged down to hell by a statue and seven grim reapers. If I the anger that I felt toward Don Giovanni had been invited or recognized in this production, then transport might have been possible through hatred rather than identification.