Denis Fodor wrote:

>What is wrong with Sellars's reading of Nozze, at least as Schwartzo
>renders it, is that, right off, sexual harrassment today is considered
>politically incorrect, while the droit de seigneur, in its time, was
>considered politically correct.  Thus we're dealing here not with an
>acceptable translation of the composer's drift of meaning but with a
>falsification of it.  It's this kind of thing that continually mars
>Regieoper.  I think I feel this even more keenly than Margaret Mikulska
>seem to.

Actually, while I like Sellars' version of the DaPonte operas, Nozze
pleases me least.  One problem was accepting Cherubino's survival after
jumping out of the window of a penthouse apartment in mid-town New
York.(Maybe he jumped out of the second floor of a two-story penthouse.)
I saw the Sellars Nozze only once, and that was a while ago, so my memory
may be deceiving me, but what seemed lost in the production was a lightness
against which the poignant and sometimes serious story is told.  Normally,
the Count strikes me as a bumbling, blundering victim of mid-life crisis
whom it's hard to dislike unless you're one of his female victims.  You
have to remember the lengths and stratagems he had to go to in wooing
his bride in the opera's prequel, which Rossini wrote later but Beaumarchais
had written earlier.  Sellars, IIRC, makes him out to be simply a ruthless
gangster, a capo perhaps, w/ no real feelings other than self gratification.

I did think the setting of Cosi, the opera w/ the silliest plot of the
three, did much to make it more acceptable as a story.  It's actually
my favorite of the Sellars adaptations.  I think making Don Alfonso a
returning Vietnam war vet who sets his girl friend, Despina, up w/ a
diner of her own, in which the action takes place, an inspired touch.

As for the drug and crime ridden South Bronx setting of Don Giovanni,
my favorite of the three and among my favorite of all operas, while I
didn't find it distracting, I didn't find it enhancing the tale much
either.

To Sellars' credit, he left not only the music unchanged but also the
Italian text, although the updated translations in the subtitles are a
hoot.

Walter Meyer