The Old Dies and the New Cannot Be Born

 

 

I had the opportunity this week to revisit the first version of Don Giovanni I ever saw, Joseph Losey's 1979 filmed production, with Loren Maazel conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Paris and Ruggero Raimondi as the infamous seducer. 

I hope to reflect on the production later and at length, but I couldn't help notice now what I surely did not notice 20+ years ago, the quote from the 19th century Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci that opens the film:

il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati. 

What a quote to set the stage. "The old dies and the new is not able to be born: in this interregnum occur phenomena morbid and most various."

First, it plain old sets a spooky, ominous tone: that there is a lapse in the order of things and the natural order has given way to perversion and decay. This element is picked up visually by the title cards, designed by Frantz Salieri (aka Francis Savel aka Dietrich de Velsa), which reek of pestilence and decay:

Second, Gramsci's quote plays neatly to the philosophical dimensions that have haunted viewers and listeners for hundreds of years. Chiefly: there is an ineffable sense of instability to Don Giovanni, that it takes place tremulously, dangerously at a crossroads, at a crossing of worlds that must be kept brief. Don Giovanni is the crossroads of so many opposites: love and hate, life and death, fear and boldness, aristocrat and peasant, of lust and purity... that when Mozart's music cuts so deeply to our hearts as it does, and fills us with all these varied forms, we're overwhelmed beyond intensity to ecstasy, taken to our darkest depths and stretched to the edges of being. 

Beyond any conductor, Maazel here captures the precariousness of that dangerous crossroads.

Finally, Gramsci's line, from the notebooks he kept during his imprisonment by the Italian fascists from 1929-1935, also sets the tone for the theme of class struggle that pervades the visuals of Losey's version. 

Don Giovanni enters clad (ironically) in white, imperiously passing the camera—which is just under eye level—as if not to take notice of us, and the camera pans across the halls of his mansion from which pour his aristocratic guests, all oblivious to our presence, save Zerlina (whom Don Giovanni has already seduced and who seeks justice from him.) 

The technique—the eye-level pan—is opposite in effect to the more famous example used at the opening of The Godfather, in which the camera brings us dancing into the wedding of the Corleone family as one of the guests. Another famous example puts us as prisoners in a camp, watching the famously strident entry of Lt. Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) in Bridge on the River Kwai, on which Don Giovanni cinematographer Gerry Fisher worked as cameraman 20 years prior.

Anyway, here we are rebuffed by the stolid aristocrats, who pour out of his castle into their host's yacht and then out again on the mainland where they tour a glass-works.  

There Don Giovanni overlooks the fire of the works and the singed workers, picking up the class theme as well as foreshadowing his fate. You don't have to be a Marxist to admire how well this is done.

You also don't have to be a Marxist to find Gramsci's statements that preceded the above quote prescient and perceptive:

L’aspetto della crisi moderna che viene lamentato come "ondata di materialismo" è collegato con ciò che si chiama "crisi di autorità." Se la classe dominante ha perduto il consenso, cioè non è più "dirigente," ma unicamente "dominante." detentrice della pura forza coercitiva, ciò appunto significa che le grandi masse si sono staccate dalle ideologie tradizionali, non credono più a ciò in cui prima credevano ecc.

The aspect of the modern crisis that comes lamented as a "wave of materialism" is connected with that which is called a "crisis of authority". If the ruling class has lost the consensus, that is, it is no longer "directing/managing", but only "dominant/controlling", holder/possessor (translation note: i.e. of illegal things) of the pure coercive force, this exactly means that the great masses are detaching themselves from traditional ideologies, no longer believing in what they once believed etc.

There is a palpable sense now that the old order has passed, its credibility spent as we have watched its lies, incompetence, and overriding self-preservation unraveled in real time during the McCarrick and Epstein scandals, the COVID-19 crisis, and the BLM riots, and that it rules by fiat. It's hard not to see all that as morbosi and svariati.

And the masses indeed no longer believe laws are passed and people are governed by consent and objective law, but by capriciousness and the self interest of the rulers. People no longer believe in the wars, in the schools, in the news... and yet new institutions, networks, and beliefs have not fallen into place quite yet. 

And so in the vacuum of the interregnum we're confronted not just with frightening external phenomena but the need to stand on our own premises, and like the visit of the Commendatore for Don Giovanni, it's an opportunity for penitence.