The Rake Punished

I keep an informal list of things to-do in my head and on scattered pieces of notebook paper. The list includes places to go, books to write, and theatre shows to attend. This last category is the one of particular interest to me today. The list of plays and musicals to see has included the following:


Hamlet*
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Arcadia*
Waiting for Godot
On the Razzle
Porgy and Bess
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Don Giovanni

The * denotes those I have already had the good fortune to have seen.


Now, the last one: Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Mozart. This past February I had an opportunity to see Porgy and Bess in Dallas but the move to North Carolina prevented me. However, two weeks ago a member of my family casually noted that he was going to see Don Giovanni in Charlotte. I immediately asked if I could go. Thus tonight is the night.

Don Giovanni.

Now I adore Gershwin but Porgy and Bess can never approach Don Giovanni. Mozart’s is the greatest musical ever created by man with his God-given abilities to create. Only Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen comes close but such an idea of their proximity is checked by how distant every other musical piece is positioned. As Charles Gounod proclaimed, Mozart's Don Giovanni is “a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection.” Soren Kierkegaard made a similar assessment.

Within its medium, unrivaled perfection. It has that sort of sublimity that prickles the skin but it’s a constant symptom that only dulls hours after the music has stopped. I’m talking about listening to the CD – I am not sure what sort of ecstatic experiences awaits me tonight.

I’ll leave the literary and theological points for your own research ... or you can simply wait for my second novel to come out ... in a number of years.