Some exciting news to share: I’m going to the Met in March!  And the opera I’ll be seeing?  Is none other than Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  Ready, get set, *flaaaaaaaail*!

Here is the story of how this all came about.  My mother had wanted all of us, as a family, to go to New York over the Christmas weekend to watch a show on Broadway; this ended up falling through mostly due to time constraints on my part (guess who doesn’t get to take time off between Christmas and New Year’s?).  Nevertheless, when we were still considering this as option for holiday-time revelry, I ended up on the Met’s website, wondering if I might be able to prevail upon my maternal parental unit to substitute the musical with an opera.  While browsing through the current season’s offerings, I noticed that there was an 8pm performance of Don Giovanni on the eve of my mother’s birthday.  She’s never been to the opera before, so, being a filial daughter with a regular source of income, I eventually decided to buy tickets to this performance for her as a present. 

Needless to say, there was also a very strong element of self-interest at work, since “go to the Met because it’s the freaking Met, man” and “see a Mozart opera” are somewhere on my classical music bucket list.  As I noted in my post on learning to love ballet, opera is a subfield of classical music in which I am still a neophyte.  For most of my life, I associated it with insufferable sopranos and the headaches their arias would induce.  Then Amadeus came along and changed my mind, at least somewhat:

It’s kind of a given that I will love anything that flowed from Mozart’s pen quill, but I do think there is a reason that it was through his operas in particular that I first became interested in the genre.  Opera is, at its core, such a heavily ornamented and aesthetic enterprise that the theatrics I associate with the canonical 19th century works (Verdi, Puccini, Wagner & Co., I am looking at you) still tend to strike me as overblown rather than inspiring; it is all very weighty stuff.  I have learned to appreciate it more as the years have gone on – after all, the two operas I’ve seen to date, La Traviata and Tosca, definitely do not hold back when it comes to drama – but it remains an acquired taste that I have yet to fully develop. 

With Mozart, though, the fleet-footedness of his music is a welcome counterbalance to this, and his melodies are instantly memorable and crafted with crystalline clarity.  I have three of his operas in my iTunes library, Don Giovanni being among them (the other two are Le nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte).  Merely listening to an opera, though, is like walking through a museum blindfolded as the paintings are described to you: it suffices, but not really. 

Basically, I get all jittery with excitement and classical music nerdiness when I think about this, even though it is still three and a half months away, but I know without a doubt that it’s going to be a highlight of 2012.  I will leave you the very famous duet from Don Giovanni referenced in the title of the post.  I’ve been familiar with it since I was about eight years old, when I used my allowance to buy this "Greatest Hits" by Mozart CD, but there was no way I could have known at the time that it involves Giovanni putting his moves on a lady and being a total perv in the process.