#I haven't been able to find a libretto for this opera

[janiedean]

#op you had me at “don giovanni and leporello are implied to be canonically fucking”#like alright I'm listening#opera

... okay like forgive me if you didn't mean 'op do explain what you think was cooking there' so if this wasn't like.. telling me to explain what I was gunning for just ignore me but I saw this in my notifications and I haven't been able to shut up about this topic since I was like eight years old so

when I say they're implied to be canonically fucking I mean that some of the libretto is phrased in italian in ways that are blatantly meaning that they fucked/they're fucking/they have a situationship/whatever, and it's supported also by how they refer to each other and so on, but specifically (and most glaringly imvho when discussing the language):

first of all don giovanni refers to leporello with colloquial you that is generally used with friends/people beneath you/your partner while leporello refers to don giovanni with polite-you (voi), in english it would equate to call someone Mr./Ms/Sir etc before addressing them but then he addresses giovanni in ways no one would address their employer (more on that later) which are entirely too colloquial/familiar, like he's only deferential when he doesn't agree with whatever the fuck is going on such as trying to talk to the statue and that's already giving HMMM vibes because you don't talk to your boss like leporello does, the polite you is just like really

I'm not going in how the whole list aria/the catalogo aria is like... leporello going off about how he knows exactly who what and when giovanni likes to go with and like unless you interpret it a certain way there's a level of pride in how he lists that which I mean implies a level of familiarity that's also not normal with your boss, and like it does not come off as someone who was forced into writing it/keeping it updated which... okay you can argue that maybe he's just proud of his work, but let's add other things

before I get into the damning sentences I'd like to state that in act i finale just after giovanni and leporello go off saying long live freedom/viva la libertà (which like... yeah in theory you can just interpret it as giovanni wanting to be free to go after women but I always interpreted it as freedom from social norms which is what giovanni stands for but never mind me), up until the whole thing with zerlina goes south giovanni and leporello are working as a team (they have parallel lines through most of that bit), giovanni tells leporello to go take care of masetto and the exchange goes like... leporello: aw poor you you're not dancing, masetto: no thanks I don't want to, leporello: dance my friend (amico mio) - and it's the same way giovanni called him before after they discussed the commendatore thing, he said così saremo amici as in great so we shall be friends, then he calls him dear masetto and then he says dance my friend let's do what everyone else is doing just as giovanni is whisking zerlina away and obviously that's played for laughs but.... the exchange goes parallel with giovanni seducing zerlina and after that when giovanni puts the blame on leporello the latter is genuinely hurt and pissed off, more on that in a second

I'm breaking this for character limit sorry

concerning that: during the masetto/zerlina wedding where they crash it, giovanni goes at them vi esibisco la mia protezione as in I'm giving the both of you my protection/benediction (as a nobleman), then they realize leporello is trying to find some girl to seduce, he asks what are you doing, leporello goes like I was doing the exact same (esibisco la mia protezione) which automatically makes it a sexual thing so... obv we're still not at why I think leporello and giovanni have the thing but that's to say there's implication the so-called protection does not extend just to women

just before the wine aria/fin c'han del vino: leporello is like god I really need to dump this beautiful madman, let's just say in general guys in opera don't call other guys beautiful but we can say well giovanni has to be, except that a second later giovanni comes and is like my leporello how is it going which like... why would you call your servant my anything unless you care to a degree, and leporello replies don giovannino mio everything is going bad which like... first it's kind of a diminutive thing I don't wanna say pet name but he also says mio/mine which.......... who tf refers to their boss in the 18th century as my little inserttheirname? and sure you can say he's sarcastic obviously given the context but you still wouldn't sass your boss like that anyway unless you're close

I would like to say that the subsequent aria is about how many women giovanni wants to add to the list... which leporello is writing, and leporello is the one supposed to find the ten women in question and the entire thing is sung to leporello not at random

now for actual damning exchange, here we go to the beginning of act II where they have a discussion that imvho is an absolute lover's spat I'm just gonna cp here with a translation trying to explain it/translate it in the way it comes across to me an italian person: g.: eh via, buffone, non mi seccar! > oh come on don't be a clown and don't bother me (harsh, extremely terse) l. no, no, padrone, non vo'restar > no master/sir, I don't want to stay (I don't think I don't want to stay is how you handle your resignation) g.: sentimi, amico… > hear me out, my friend... (we have my friend again [amico], let's remember it from before - saremo amici, amico mio when leporello and masetto were dancing same as giovanni and zerlina were -, and like first giovanni was bleh don't bother me now he immediately changes tone/tune and he's like MY FRIEND HEAR ME OUT? okay sure absolutely something you'd tell your servant that you pay/employ only) l.: vo'andar, vi dico! > I want to go, I'm telling you! (extremely harsh, doesn't wanna hear it, just being like nah we're done bye) g.: ma che ti ho fatto che vuoi lasciarmi? > but what did I ever do to you that now you want to leave me? (italicized because lasciarsi is how you say romantically break up, sure you can say also lasciare to say leave your work... but then he says you want to leave me, he could have said che vuoi andare via/that you want to leave which has absolutely not the same implications and yet...) l.: o niente affatto, quasi ammazzarmi > oh nothing at all, you just almost had me killed (he's pissed off obviously) g.: va, che sei matto, fu per burlar > oh come on you're crazy, it was all a joke (we can go into giovanni's characterization wrt not taking much seriously and so on but like he goes from all contrite to oh come on you're exaggerating it) l.: ed io non burlo, ma voglio andar > well I'm not joking, but I want to go (see he says andare which giovanni also could have absolutely used before... and he didn't) now the rest of the piece is basically the two of them singing bits of this in various rearranged order at each other but like believe me when I say that with the *leaving me* implication it sounds like two people who were together and one wants to break up and the other doesn't but doesn't want to take responsibility for their bullshit

that is immediately followed by don giovanni offering leporello more money to make peace (fare pace is what you do when you argued with someone and then you apologized and talked it out......... but like again you don't make peace with your boss or employee like it's just not a thing) and then leporello goes like: 'Oh, sentite, per questa volta la cerimonia accetto; ma non vi ci avvezzate; non credete di sedurre i miei pari, come le donne, a forza di danari.' > 'Okay listen, this once I'm accepting the whole song and dance, but don't get adjusted to it: don't you think you can seduce people such as me, the way you seduce women, just throwing money at them', and a second later he's like yeah I'll do what you want as long as we leave women be (which lasts for like three seconds but never mind): sure you can seduce people in a non-sexual way, you can say you were seduced by a good deal or something like that... but then never mind that giovanni is called seduttore/seducer from the title of the thing, it specifically says you can't seduce me the way you do women... which implies that he can be seduced in another way that does not imply giving him money, just after they basically had a spat that is just not a thing boss/employee should have... and I have to think it's a chance it's phrased like this? yeah nope

but let's go on

we can also add that in the following bit when giovanni tells leporello to pretend to be him *seducing his ex-wife* leporello is like eh I think you're a jerk (specifically that your soul is made of bronze) but then goes on with it and actually goes like eh I'm actually enjoying it, to which we can also add that elvira does not actually figure it out until later... so on top of that now leporello is smooching giovanni's ex which was the one he sang the list aria to before which I mean... considering the above I think implications are implied also because leporello is kinda down with it

and after this we get to when anna/zerlina/masetto/elvira/ottavio confront leporello after it turns out that he wasn't actually giovanni, where we have leporello's second aria which goes: Ah, pietà, signori miei! > have pity on me my good sirs Dò ragione a voi, a lei > I think you are all correct Ma il delitto mio non è. > but the crime isn't mine Il padron con prepotenza, > my master, with impertinence/arrogance L'innocenza mi rubò. > stole my innocence now: innocence/innocenza is like... a not so backhanded way to refer to a woman being pure/a virgin, like to lose your innocence means to not be a virgin anymore, and by the way 'stealing innocence with impertinence/arrogance' is exactly the way you could describe what happened with don giovanni and anna in the opening of the opera (like you can choose to think they fucked or they didn't depending on your intepretation but what anna tells ottavio is basically that he tried to force himself on her and she was innocent because she thought it was him) and like yeah contextless you can take it literally and be like giovanni forced him to do the thing so he lit stole his innocence............ but sorry in italian innocence also means that and again I'm not presuming my name is lorenzo da ponte but I'm pretty sure you could have phrased the same concept differently without using that word

we can also go over how the next interaction they have is basically giovanni telling leporello how he put moves on one girl he has a thing for and is extremely colloquial/informal and leporello just basically is like YOU'RE A JERK which again colloquial as fuck

I'm glossing over how if someone wants the whole dinner scene could be staged making them do extremely not pg things and it would imvho make sense with the text but that's me and not text

what I want to get at is that at the end of the whole thing when the commendatore invites giovanni to dinner the first thing leporello tells him is 'sorry he doesn't have time' which like... if you subscribe to the school that leporello doesn't gaf about giovanni and only goes along with his crap because it's his employer why the hell would he try to get him out of going to his death as his first instinct when it's obvious he's himself scared shitless? especially considering the finale with the whole moral thing was attached after because censors but the whole thing was never supposed to end with leporello being like eh I'll find a better employer? like... sorry if you despised someone like that you wouldn't tell the literal embodiment of death that he has no time to dine with them without even checking in, and when he's asked the question he screams at giovanni to say no like....... sorry but I'mma not buy for a second he didn't care and way more than it'd be appropriate for your boss and if the above stuff didn't exist I could believe he cared out of human decency but... yeah no

then you could say but how do you know it was like willingly written like that surely it was 18th century right?

I have my reservations because:

i'm not gonna go into the così fan tutte wasp nest but the like everything despina sings about in that opera in any aria she has can be summed up in 'women also should enjoy good sex why the fuck would you pass on it and for what it concerns me I get laid like nothing else', and in that one it's basically in your face that everyone is having sex everywhere so it's not like it's a one-off thing;

mozart among other things wrote himself a small canon titled lick me in the ass so I also am gonna presume he wasn't exactly a prude and also he knew italian perfectly;

lorenzo da ponte, among other things, had multiple mistresses and children while he was ordained a priest, got charged with *public concubinage*, lived in a brothel (supposedly), was good friends with casanova and got exiled from venice on account of all of the above and like wasn't shy about any of that in his memories

with these premises sorry but I'm in no way shape or form believing that those two wouldn't know the implications of those specific word choices and like... you could say but maybe you can interpret that today but who tells you the 18th century was the same, I can 100% assure you that any da ponte libretto sounds more like current italian except for a few word choices than 99% of the opera librettos around including later ones and I've been thinking the above since I was in elementary school that's the level of obvious it was to me (and I'm sure I read some actual critic theorizing that once going off about homoerotic subtext and I felt very validated but XDD) and that's my ted talk thanks for having listened to it and sorry for the word vomit

I wanna hear your controversial opera opinions if you have any

OH I THINK I DO *cough* *waits for rotten tomatoes*

la donna è mobile is the most overrated aria in the history of arias

subsequently everyone in rigoletto except sparafucile behaves in ways so lacking of braincells there's a reason why I never cry about it (I mean I love rigoletto but I hate that aria and no one uses their brain in it I maintain)

I find puccini in general terribly overrated and you won't catch me paying to actually see puccini operas in the theater sorry

in that brand of unpopular, m. butterfly the movie >>>> madama butterfly the opera and rent > la boheme sorry X°D

srs rossini operas are vastly underrated and would eat most more famous srs stuff under the table and honestly the french guillaume tell >>> mostly anything

rossini's otello > verdi's

un ballo in maschera is verdi's best opera I'm dying on that hill

mozart > everyone else anyway

the fact that le comte ory isn't staged often is a crime against good taste

I tend to prefer modern stagings to classical ones even if the modern one is based on supposedly outrageous readings of the thing (PETER SELLARS IN MY HEART FOREVER but also micheletto in my heart forever)

I absolutely detest the whole 'ah singers today aren't as good as in the forties/fifties/sixties/good singing died with pavarotti and sutherland' like for once today people don't perform operas cutting 1/4th of them that should be good for something

in that unpopular opinion, I don't particularly like pavarotti, I absolutely don't like sutherland very much and I think callas was good for drama but her barbiere di siviglia recording is sung in a way that irks me and she's not like probably cranking my top ten female opera singers anyway *hides from tomatoes*

in that same opinion, corelli >>>> pavarotti every other day

les contes d'hoffmann should be way more performed/famous

don giovanni is not a villain and I'm dying on that hill (idt this is unpopular with critics but it's unpopular with the kids)

don giovanni and leporello are imvho implied to be canonically fucking or to have canonically fucked and I say it because the text imvho implies so and no way da ponte out of anyone didn't know exactly what he was doing nor mozart didn't understand that either

ppl should listen to more donizetti/donizetti should be performed more beyond lucia and elisir and the fact that idk anna bolena rests in WE PERFORM IT AT THE MET ONCE EVERY OTHER TEN YEARS status is for me extremely sad and should be rectified

ernani has the most stupid ending plot point of any opera in existence including rigoletto

the only wagner I'm ever going to listen until I live is the ride of the valkyrie because I'm not even gonna get into his technical merits but every note of wagner's exhudes how insufferable he was and after the time I went to see parsifal and I started having literal hallucinations around the fourth hour (and I swear I was sober) I'm not coming close to wagner ever again I don't care X°D

I... probably do have more stuff that most regular ppl going to the opera would roast me for but X°DDD

[hunchbacked-one-eyed-lame]

Adelina Patti costumed as Esmeralda, in Fabio Campana’s opera of the same name, which premiered in Saint Petersburg in 1869.  Patti was unable to attend the premiere, despite the role being written with her in mind, but she was able to sing the role when the opera was produced in London at Covent Garden.