Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 87

Petter Sellars’ D on G iovan n i

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Further complicating the issue of textual revision is the fact that don Juan
has always simultaneously evolved in popular and elitist art. In fact, Mozart and
DaPonte incorporated aspects of the puppet and vaudeville theater, the milieu in
which don Juan survived for the forty years preceding the debut of Don Giovanni.
Mandel points out that in these don Juan plays, '‘the hero yields to the funny servant”
(256).^ These sources, then, may explain why Leporello has a bigger role than
Catalinon or Sganarelle. These popular versions also provide evidence that don
Juan has not always been a gourmet. In a puppet play from Augsburg, long before
he was regurgitating fish sandwiches, Don Juan complained about his salad dressing
(Mandel 276).
These inroads into popular culture have never excluded don Juan from
serious critical attention. In fact, not only is Don Giovanni canonical, but some,
including Kierkegaard, argue that only the opera can truly capture don Juan’s
ephemeral essence (118-119). Several facets of the twentieth-century don Juan
surface in similarly fleeting settings. In his articles, “Don Juan Goes to the Movies”
and “The People’s don Juan,” Armand Singer has surveyed instances in which don
Juan has been used as the name of a place, product, pseudonym, or subject for
films and television. For example, in an episode of Route 66, entitled “The Stone
Guest,” a libertine miner seduces a women in a cave while the Central City Colorado
Opera stages Don Giovanni. The title of the episode becomes most appropriate
when the mine caves in. ("Movies” 13). A pancake house in Alberta, Canada served
a don Juan burger, “covered with hot-blooded Spanish sauce. After one, you are
irresistible!” (“The People’s 330). The internet also provides a popular outlet for
don Juan. Surfers who access the w ebsite The Don Juan C enter at
www.SOSUave.com/ are invited to subscribe to a bimonthly newsletter filled
with advice on attracting, meeting, and dating women. These examples may verge
on the trivial but they do attest to don Juan’s ability to survive in the most popular
of settings. Just as Mozart and Da Ponte, then, Sellars has combined the high- and
low-brow don Juans.
As one might expect, the inherent intertextuality of the don Juan story
forges a relationship among his creators. Heather Mac Donald is deeply dissatisfied
with the interaction between Sellars and Mozart. She objects to the fact that the
director has made the composer an anachronistic critic of contemporary society:
“Mozart is at best a distorted mirror of the present. He speaks much more clearly
about his own era” (712). These comments introduce the sticky question of
intentionality. Although I carmot know what they intended, I can comment on some
of the ambiguous ways in which Tirso, Mozart, and Sellars have chosen to speak
about their own eras. For example, no one can answer with certainty whether Tirso
wanted his trickster to be a noble rebel or sleazy seducer. Any one of us could, and
probably has, wavered back and forth between the two options, now insisting that