Pablo Massa wrote:

>Adjectives such as "racist" and "misogynous" applied to a XVIII century
>libretto?...hmmm.  According to this, almost all western literature is
>misogynous, racist

Well, um, it is.  The question is, what do we do about it? One extreme
says we point it out at every opportunity, the other extreme says we deny
it at every opportunity.  Hopefully there's a middle ground.  When it comes
to performance, we have the choice of 1) presenting a work as it might have
been understood by its original audience, or 2) shaping our interpretation
to take into account the changes in social and political thought that have
occurred since then.  I think there's something to be said for both
approaches.  I prefer to start with the first, because it allows us to
learn something about the past, and thereby to understand the relationship
between the past and the present in the hope of improving the future.  But
once we know the work in its original setting, the second approach is
worthwhile too, because it allows us to look at old stories in new ways,
and thereby even better understand the relationship between the past and
present in the hope of improving the future.

Note that reshaping an opera is harder than reshaping a play.  In the
play, you only have words; in opera, you have words and notes.  Mozart,
in particular, was such a master at characterization that it would be hard
to make his characters seem significantly different from what they were
originally.  (Don Giovanni, by the way, is an exception, precisely because
the music does such a superb job of *not* characterizing him.  That's why
the Romantics were able to go to town with him.)

Peter Goldstein