Leon Kosavic as Masetto and Erwin Schrott as Don Giovanni. Photographed by Mark Douet
Scents and Sensibility
Don Giovanni; Ossia Il Dissoluto Punito, opera buffa in two acts, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a further revival of the 2014 production, conducted by Hartmut Haenchen, directed by Kasper Holten, Royal Opera, Monday 16th September 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones
Don Giovanni, played by bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, suitably demonic and over-powering, wants sex with as many women as possible. His appetite is somewhat indiscriminate, as his conquests (1000 in Spain alone) range from the young to the old, from the rich to the poor, from the fat to the thin. “Leave the women alone?”, he asks Leporello, rhetorically, “You’re mad! You know they are more necessary to me than the bread I eat! Than the air I breathe!” This compulsion, sometimes called satyriasis or Don Juanism, lends itself to a psycho-analytic interpretation. Indeed, according to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Don Giovanni was his favourite opera. Freud doubtless considered the killing of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father (performed by Brindley Sherratt) as evidence of the Oedipus Complex. And there are voyeuristic elements evocative of the “primal scene”, as when Masetto, en catimini, spies on his fiancé and Don Giovanni. Continue reading
White Guilt and Christianity
Ilana Mercer
White Guilt and Christianity
By Ilana Mercer
Is white guilt a Christian affliction? Edward Gibbon would probably have said so.
In “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” 12 volumes, 1776, he saddled nascent Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire, no less.
By so surmising, Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”
And, indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive, pathologically inclusive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of “criminals and women.”
Even more infuriating to his detractors was Gibbon’s prodigious scholarship. “No one could disprove Gibbon’s basic facts,” notes American author Willson Whitman. Whitman, who wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version, remarks how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity.”“Among these reasons [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance, in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.” Continue reading →
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