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