Don Giovanni Captured

With Don Giovanni" Captured, Richard Will takes on the challenge of considering a single opera through engagement with its entire history of recorded performance, encompassing both audio recordings (starting with wax cylinders and 78s) and video recordings, from DVDs, to films, to streaming videos. Recorded opera has become a genre unto itself, connected with actual stage productions but with its own history and conventions. Today, recordings and other forms of mediation inform our experience of live opera as much as the other way around. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Mozart's Don Giovanni to sit still, and the tremendous transformation they undergo from performance to performance, and from generation to generation. By choosing an opera with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as much more than the tale of a single libertine aristocrat and as a standard-bearer for changing myths about eros and for how we socialize (and represent in performance) sexual and power relations that run the gamut from seduction, to predatoriness, to rape"--