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

the opera as far as Leporello’s famous aria Madamina , il catalogo è questo , but just as it is coming to a close, he blasts our sense of the familiar by taking us backstage where the rehearsal pianist, the son of the director, has gone entirely mad and is claiming himself to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He insists that he has rewritten the opera in such a way that Don Giovanni does not go to hell at the end but instead becomes a saint and goes to heaven, and he demands that the singers perform it his way.
    There is a palpable feeling of unrest when Björn cracks open the opera like this, but what the audience does not yet realize is that another phenomenon has been occurring simultaneously. All the empty seats and the standing room places have been filling up with punk teenagers from the Lido, who have infiltrated the theater (Have they bribed the guards? Have they overpowered them?) in a frenzy to see the mad maestro about whom there has been such speculation in the press. They are waiting in the aisles, faces cool beneath their spiky orange hair, each of them a gun cocked and ready to go off.
    Have I been the only member of the jury to see the kids creep into the theater? I can feel their heat and unrest as they breathe all around us. I can feel their desire to disrupt the proceedings and rout their elegant elders.
    Why have the proper matrons in their Valentinos said nothing about this? Why do people say nothing when they sit in a theater and smell smoke? Herd instinct? Fear of being the first troublemaker? Some deep reversion to childhood that overtakes us as members of an audience in a darkened room?
    The film goes on. The Mozart figure begins raving about the unfairness of Don Giovanni’s final punishment and how his happy ending to the opera is really more just, more true, more fair. In front of me, the witchy woman with the large right eye begins to cackle, then turns and catches me in her glittering gaze. “Beware, Jessica,” she mutters, or do her lips merely form the words?
    It is my very own Grigory who starts the riot.
    â€œDecadent capitalist rubbish!” he thunders, standing and turning to storm ostentatiously out of the theater. “Free the film festival!” he shouts. And, as if on cue, a chorus of teenagers repeats: “Free the film festival!” (Only some, of course, heighten it to “Fuck the film festival!”) Whereupon masses of them, letting out war whoops and whistles, begin to leap over the seats and storm the mezzanine where Björn, Lilli, the actors, and the rest of the jury sit quivering with fear. The insanity in the film has suddenly become real.
    Whatever Grigory’s reasons for making the protest (to appease the ancient politicos in the Kremlin at home, to ensure his next trip abroad, to silence those naysayers who claim he has lost his political nerve), the punk kids have surely been waiting for just such a signal to go wild. They scream and throw things, jostle the panicky parental figures in the audience, light joints, drop matches, and run whooping and whistling through the aisles.
    The passive audience turns into a stampeding mob! Countesses in their glitter, counts in their “smokings,” actors and actresses in their tuxes and sequins, all scramble and try to flee the theater as if the ancien régime were newly overtaken by the sans-culottes . But the side doors are sealed, and the kids, emboldened by Grigory’s apparent support—for the moment he is their hero and he seems once again the young revolutionary he never really was—storm the mezzanine as if to kidnap Björn. (What they wish to do with him is not clear.) All the while Mozart’s music keeps pouring forth. Lilli takes charge of a very shaky Björn and begins to escort him to the rear of the mezzanine. Leonardo da Leone follows, trying at the same time to restrain Grigory’s outbursts and to protect Björn.
    I experience a moment of sheer terror