An injured Don Giovanni is tortured by his colleagues

An injured Don Giovanni is tortured by his colleagues

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norman lebrecht

April 30, 2018

Unusual happenings at the recent Don Giovanni in Santiago, Chile.

A few minutes into the last performance of a boisterous production, the baritone Levent Bakirci suffered a painful injury when Donna Anna fell onto his left hand, fracturing a finger.

 

Levent, good trouper that he is carried on singing.

Other members of the cast, unaware of his pain, kept raining blows onto his left hand. Donna Elvira, we hear, was particularly harsh.

‘At the end,’ says Levent, ‘the women got their revenge and Don Giovanni was really punished.’

Comments

  • CYM says:

    Kudos to Levent for not letting ‘Don Giovannish’ too early. A bit disappointed at Levent’s pal, Leporello, for not giving him a hand … and ease Don G. final punishment …

  • william osborne says:

    I find the life of Da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist) fascinating. He was born and raised Jewish, was converted to Catholicism, and became a priest. In spite of being a priest, he was a womanizer and was banished from his homeland of Venice due to his dissolute life. After sojourns in Vienna and London, he immigrated to the USA and became the first professor at Columbia who was raised Jewish, and the first one who was a Catholic priest. How could he not write opera librettos?

  • Saul Davis says:

    Conversion does not make one stop being a Jew. No wonder he felt unrestricted by the Church.

    • Scotty says:

      Indeed that’s the difference between Jews and people who convert to Judaism. The latter can stop being Jewish.

    • Bruce says:

      Depends on your point of view. As I understand it (which may not be thoroughly), it’s like when one spouse refuses to recognize a full and legal divorce even after the other spouse remarries. It’s kind of an “OK, well, you can keep calling yourself my spouse if you want” situation.

      (But yes, there is also the genetic component which stays the same regardless of the person’s beliefs)

    • Saxon Broken says:

      Um…this is a bit of a strange thing to say. You seem to think being Jewish is biological rather than a religious belief. This is definitely not what Dal Ponte or his contemporaries believed.

  • Sharon says:

    The Orthodox Judaism of the eighteenth century (and in those days Orthodox Judaism was the only kind there was) was more puritanical sexually than Catholicism

  • Rgiarola says:

    If my memory doesn’t fail, It was also during a live performance of Don Giovanni that Solti broke his baton in his left forearm. Part of the wood remained stuck in the flesh until the intermission, something that could be very painful.

    Perhaps it is the origin of the nickname “”the screaming skull” lol

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