Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice by Erica Jong Page A

toward the mezzanine to applaud Björn, who merely nods his head and waves his hand diffidently, then indicates his actors. It is Lilli who seems to acknowledge the applause most regally, Lilli the maestro’s wife, a part she was evidently born for.
    â€œ Salute al maestro ,” il direttore says again. And again and again comes the deafening applause. Oh, I know the Italian habit of promoting signore to dottore, dottore to professore (even hotel directors here are called professori if they have been in the profession long enough and are loved and feared), but never have I heard the word maestro uttered with such surpassing respect.
    Even when the applause abates a little and the actors are introduced, the tumult in the room is still so great that we can hardly hear their names. The maestro is here; the maestro is triumphant.
    Presently, the houselights dim and Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni thunders forth, full of pathos, full of the terror and wonder of lust. This marriage of the cold north and warm south, this hybrid of Teutonic discipline and Latin dolce far niente— Mozart’s music perhaps even more than Byron’s poetry, or Browning’s—embodies the vitality that results when north falls passionately in love and mates with south. And where more perfectly are these elements meshed than in Don Giovanni , the story of a cruel, perfidious, empty lover softened only by the prayerful playfulness of Mozart’s music? Mozart, like Shakespeare, has the ability to make even his villains human, softening their edges with song.
    A small, provincial opera company in Germany is rehearsing Don Giovanni . The director of the company is in love with the soprano, but so is his son, a charming, roguish ne’er-do-well, who is the rehearsal pianist for the company. The son is a bit mad, and in his madness imagines himself to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father to be Leopold Mozart. As the opera is rehearsed he falls more and more into a fantasy of himself as Mozart, wooing the soprano with music he claims to have composed especially for her. All his inadequacies as a man, an artist, a lover, are assuaged by his passionate identification with Mozart.
    We cut back and forth between the rehearsals for the opera and the offstage life that goes on among this curious love triangle. This part of the film is in black and white: the rehearsals, the backstage maneuvering, the introduction to the story. Then suddenly it is the opening night of Don Giovanni and the film bursts out in full color. The curtain rises and the opera begins with its thundering chords. We see the members of the orchestra fiddling, blowing, pounding their drums. We see the conductor’s face, a mirror of the complex beauty held captive within the music. The incomparable overture blends into the opening scene, and suddenly we are with Leporello as he paces before Donna Anna’s house.
    The opera reduces us; the opera masters us; and we are off into its world, now identifying with Leporello as he bemoans his fate, now watching Donna Anna pursue Don Giovanni, now caught in the mortal struggle between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni, now feeling Don Giovanni’s impenitence as he boasts of having raped the daughter and murdered the father.
    We settle into the opera with a sense of perfect familiarity, knowing the moves to come, knowing that each of our own feelings will be uncannily embodied in a main character. In Don Giovanni, impenitent evil; in Leporello, doubt and cynicism toward a master coupled with grudging admiration; in Donna Anna, grief and outraged innocence; in Donna Elvira, bitterness and rage. We are borne along on this current of familiar feeling and on the complementary current of Mozart’s music. The whole theater seems to relax. The audience is in the familiar, the traditional, a crisis whose outcome is totally known.

    Björn, master magician that he is, knows all this. He allows us to wallow in