deh vieni alla finestra
Liza’s main man Paulo Szot has some interesting and rather bold (if La Cieca may say so) opinions about the character of Leporello in today’s New York Times: “Don Giovanni needs him for everything: butt sex, to give him food, to give him drink, to share his feelings with.” (The article, fetchingly entitled “The Great Mozart Switcheroo,” poses the probing question, “So which, in the end, is the better part?”)
Messages 28 and 29. Of course a street sweeper could not yell he was married to a noblewoman and make it so. Every social class had a certain set of obligations and rules of conduct dictated by honor, and to go outside your class was a violation of honor that could be punished by death. That is the justification for the killing of a nobleman by his subjects in Lope de Vega’s “Fuenteovejuna.” We are talking about theater, not the reality of social practices. It makes sense symbolically that simply swearing before God had the strength of law. It was a way for the church to assert its earthly power.