Overview

“Don Giovanni” Captured considers the life of a single opera, engaging with the entire history of its recorded performance.   Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history has revealed a growing trend toward critique—an increasing effort on the part of performers and directors to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims. In “Don Giovanni” Captured, Richard Will sets out to analyze more than a century’s worth of recorded performances of the opera, tracing the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. Will consults both audio recordings, starting with wax cylinders and 78s, as well as video recordings, including DVDs, films, and streaming videos. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Don Giovanni to sit still. As Will points out, recordings and other media shape our experience of opera as much as live performance. By choosing a work with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as a standard-bearer for evolving ideas about desire and power, both on and off the stage.

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9780226815411

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Reviews

""A fascinating new book by the musicologist Richard Will, 'Don Giovanni' Captured, reviews and analyzes the history of recordings of the opera, dating back to the age of early phonograph records at the beginning of the twentieth century. . . Don Giovanni, an opera that is almost entirely set at night, is certainly a dark comedy, if it is a comedy at all, and Will’s study of its exceptionally varied recording history suggests all the different shades of light and darkness that constitute the moral chiaroscuro of this elusive work."" * New York Review of Books * “Will combines social sensitivity with a rare trove of historical perceptions that will prove rewarding to readers who have some familiarity with Mozart’s score. His analysis of the changing sound and use of recitative, like his illustration of the crucial role of conductors, is especially enriching.” * Opera News * ""Musicologist Richard Will’s fascinating study, Don Giovanni Captured, examines the way Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has been heard and seen since the birth of recorded sound... For those of us who care about opera, Don Giovanni Captured is a fascinating book."" * New York Journal of Books * “Richard Will’s ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured is a welcome addition to approaches to Mozart’s masterpiece, so often marooned in constraining music-critical discourse or run aground in moral debates. Armed now with Will’s multiple accounts of audio and visual recordings, we have a richly mediated history that will disrupt how we think about operas as ‘works’ while superseding more insular and less historical analyses. ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured, by building on a lively archive of performed recordings, will greatly expand the horizons of how we teach and think about this incomparable work.” * Martha Feldman, University of Chicago * “This is a highly original book, one of the first to devote detailed and sustained attention to the history of a work’s recorded interpretation. It is quite astonishing to think that nothing of the sort has existed until now, given that we have lived with recordings for well over a century. ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured constitutes a most welcome and timely addition to the literature on Don Giovanni, Mozart’s operas, the genre of opera, and indeed the entire field of musicology.” * Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza * ""This is a fascinating and long-overdue study of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni as it has been presented in recorded form, both aurally and visually . . . Highly recommended.""  * Choice * ""This insightful and original study illuminates fundamental trends in the performance of Mozart over the past 125 years, while also exploring the history of the recording industry as well as demonstrating the implications of performance choices for understanding the opera’s many complexities."" * Early Music America * ""The act of performing is also at the heart of Richard Will’s survey of Don Giovanni interpretation across a century of recordings, structured by early excerpt recordings and their emphasis on characters, how later complete recordings engage with the opera’s subject matter, and the psychological contributions of video recordings to the work’s performance history. . . . Will’s narrative deftly weaves journeys of perspective through lenses of characters and their diverse interpretations over time, to say nothing of how the opera’s themes regarding sexuality and violence have been handled."" * ARSC Journal *

Richard Will's 'Don Giovanni' Captured is a welcome addition to approaches to Mozart's masterpiece, so often marooned in constraining music-critical discourse or run aground in moral debates. Armed now with Will's multiple accounts of audio and visual recordings, we have a richly mediated history that will disrupt how we think about operas as 'works' while superseding more insular and less historical analyses. 'Don Giovanni' Captured, by building on a lively archive of performed recordings, will greatly expand the horizons of how we teach and think about this incomparable work. * Martha Feldman, University of Chicago * This is a highly original book, one of the first to devote detailed and sustained attention to the history of a work's recorded interpretation. It is quite astonishing to think that nothing of the sort has existed until now, given that we have lived with recordings for well over a century. 'Don Giovanni' Captured constitutes a most welcome and timely addition to the literature on Don Giovanni, Mozart's operas, the genre of opera, and indeed the entire field of musicology. * Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza *

""A fascinating new book by the musicologist Richard Will, 'Don Giovanni' Captured, reviews and analyzes the history of recordings of the opera, dating back to the age of early phonograph records at the beginning of the twentieth century. . . Don Giovanni, an opera that is almost entirely set at night, is certainly a dark comedy, if it is a comedy at all, and Will’s study of its exceptionally varied recording history suggests all the different shades of light and darkness that constitute the moral chiaroscuro of this elusive work."" * New York Review of Books * “Will combines social sensitivity with a rare trove of historical perceptions that will prove rewarding to readers who have some familiarity with Mozart’s score. His analysis of the changing sound and use of recitative, like his illustration of the crucial role of conductors, is especially enriching.” * Opera News * ""Musicologist Richard Will’s fascinating study, Don Giovanni Captured, examines the way Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has been heard and seen since the birth of recorded sound... For those of us who care about opera, Don Giovanni Captured is a fascinating book."" * New York Journal of Books * “Richard Will’s ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured is a welcome addition to approaches to Mozart’s masterpiece, so often marooned in constraining music-critical discourse or run aground in moral debates. Armed now with Will’s multiple accounts of audio and visual recordings, we have a richly mediated history that will disrupt how we think about operas as ‘works’ while superseding more insular and less historical analyses. ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured, by building on a lively archive of performed recordings, will greatly expand the horizons of how we teach and think about this incomparable work.” * Martha Feldman, University of Chicago * “This is a highly original book, one of the first to devote detailed and sustained attention to the history of a work’s recorded interpretation. It is quite astonishing to think that nothing of the sort has existed until now, given that we have lived with recordings for well over a century. ‘Don Giovanni’ Captured constitutes a most welcome and timely addition to the literature on Don Giovanni, Mozart’s operas, the genre of opera, and indeed the entire field of musicology.” * Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza * ""This is a fascinating and long-overdue study of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni as it has been presented in recorded form, both aurally and visually . . . Highly recommended.""  * Choice * ""This insightful and original study illuminates fundamental trends in the performance of Mozart over the past 125 years, while also exploring the history of the recording industry as well as demonstrating the implications of performance choices for understanding the opera’s many complexities."" * Early Music America * ""The act of performing is also at the heart of Richard Will’s survey of Don Giovanni interpretation across a century of recordings, structured by early excerpt recordings and their emphasis on characters, how later complete recordings engage with the opera’s subject matter, and the psychological contributions of video recordings to the work’s performance history. . . . Will’s narrative deftly weaves journeys of perspective through lenses of characters and their diverse interpretations over time, to say nothing of how the opera’s themes regarding sexuality and violence have been handled."" * ARSC Journal * ""[Will] definitely comes through in this exploration of the 'mediated' Don Giovanni, tracing among other things the myriad ways by which recordings have contributed to the resilience of the libertine myth. . . . His analytical approaches offer a welcome example for the study of opera and intermediality. . . . Will anchors even the most old-school archival data to a broader audience and purpose."" * Journal of Musicological Research *

Author Information

Richard Will is professor of music at the University of Virginia. His publications include The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven and Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism.

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