The following excerpt is drawn from the Introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled Colloquy: Sexual Violence in Opera: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Production as Resistance. 

Violence against women in opera has received considerable scholarly attention. In 1979 Catherine Clment asserted that opera features a parade of dying women, arguing that opera’s plots inflict violence upon women and that its gorgeous music glosses over that violence. She reiterated her claim in 2000, insisting that sopranos are the inevitable victims of opera, particularly nineteenth-century opera: Humiliated, hunted, driven mad, burnt alive, buried alive, stabbed, committing suicide Violetta, Sieglinde, Lucia, Brnnhilde, Aida, Norma, Mlisande, Li, Butterfly, Isolde, Lulu, and so many others All sopranos, and all victims. Musicologists such as Carolyn Abbate, Joseph Kerman, Susan McClary, and Mary Ann Smart have engaged her assertions, noting that they were most applicable to the nineteenth-century tragic canon, while pointing to the artistic, cultural, and sometimes economic power wielded by the women who performed these roles. Relatively few musicologists, however, have focused on opera’s sexual violence. Some have done so through critical interpretation, while others have focused specifically on campus and classroom concerns.

With this information in mind, read the section entitled Mozarts Don Giovanni in Chapter 35 (pp. 204 205) of The Enjoyment of Music which provides a very general overview of the plot of Mozarts opera. At the opening of the opera Don Giovanni, in disguise, is described as trying to seduce Donna Anna (p. 204). More recently, writers have described the event as attempted rape. For example, Richard Will notes: In scholarship, criticism, and some textbooks, tributes to his [Don Giovannis] defiant masculinity have begun losing ground to discussions of the murder, attempted rape, and repeated humiliation he visits on his fellow characters.

How might you re-imagine a contemporary staging of Don Giovanni that engages with sexual harassment and violence on college campuses today.

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