(Curtain rises after conclusion of mediocre performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The two Devils speak:)

A

ll over this big city of ours, the light is waning, as it should be, for it’s scheduled soon to be evening—and a big opening-night party that everybody—all the glitterati—sitting through this mediocre production has really been waiting for! The opera itself was just a polite pretense or pretext.

What do you mean, “the light is waning and it’s scheduled soon to be evening”? It’s already been evening—it’s opening night, not opening matinee! Your sense of timing seems pretty dim, for a performer!

Sense of timing? We don’t need it, all we need is a sense of timelessness. Us two devils have partaken in every performance of every production of Don Giovanni since even before Mozart was even born—who needs him?

(Humming bars of ending of production just concluded:) What an end to yet still the latest newest production of this always the same yet always somehow different old opera, that’s always going on somewhere in this world—even in Japan!

The opera and we are eternal. We’re busy. Between performances we’re out in the world committing various pranks and doing mischief in general. But our theatrical job—tediously endless—is to keep coming back to the latest performance—even multi-simultaneous different performances of different productions spread over wide-rangingly different stages—we keep coming back to escort the screaming Don to hellfire after he got his soft human hand well shaken—too well shaken—by the hard stone hand of the hard stone statue bent on hard stone vengeance.

The blemished stone statue.

Huh?

Did you notice just before that on the white-maned top of the head of that marble Commendatore—that old rotter—there was a banal anal—or anal banal—token or byproduct of a strutting pigeon’s putrid digestive process?

Ugh! Symbolic of the latest decadent mediocre production of this tedious old—

Now, now—let’s not get too jaded—(Humming ending bars of performance just ended:) What a too-long ending. Ho hum. Glorious Mozart—too old hat, too top hat, too highbrow: don’t we prefer the diabolically trendy rock and roll, punk music, high-tech electronic music? I’m tired of stale music appreciation.

And I’m tired of our tedious old job of having to escort the just newly died Don to that alleged theologic location in mythology called Hell, which we atheistic old devils just know doesn’t exist any more than its alleged predecessor did—Hades. It’s all a boring old rumor, about Hell.

As devils, we sure don’t take our job seriously.

It’s just the same jaded old treadmill, back and forth. Oh, Mozart sickens me! So does Hell! So do we!

(Humming last bars of performance just ended:) Ho hum! Now Mozart’s glorious, ever newly freshly eternal strains have dimmed in silence. The performance deserved its mediocre audience.

Audience, yes indeed. Did you notice them tonight? They saw and heard the opera, but did they really fully get its message, take it to heart, understand it?

Message? What message? What was Da Ponte’s intention?

(Threateningly:) Don’t get intellectual on me! To Hell with the opera’s inner “message,” the librettist’s “intention”! That’s not the point!

No? Then what’s the point?

The point is that it’s opening night and for the opening night bourgeois burghers of glitterati rich enough to attend, there’s the party afterwards to look forward to, where they get to mingle with the cast, the musicians, the conductor, the director—even with us!

And for us too the party is the real attraction—the bottom line!

We’ll mingle with the cast and audience and—who knows—maybe we’ll get laid!

Get late? Yes, it is getting late! Let’s hurry! The play’s not the thing—the party’s the thing!

(Delaying the other:) Yes, but haven’t we been desecrating the opera? We’ve been too cynical, jaded—spoiled. Let’s give the opera its due.

Do? Like that pigeon gave the stone statue’s white hair its do?

(Sporadically humming bars from different parts over the whole opera:) The plot thickens, the music spreads, grows wider: it’s a masterpiece. Mozart is achieving immortality, to be conferred on his characters too, for being in it. What an opera! Day succeeds night, it’s a new change of scene.

(More humming of bars:) All this moody intrigue, to the rise and fall of music sublimely steady in racing through all the moods. Mozart traces the scene with an infallible ear, to sprightly measure.

(More humming of bars:) A few times, the tenor voice of Don Ottavio suddenly emerges solo from a climbing-up-and-down chorus of alternating characters alternatingly combining, and bursts loose with golden richness and light wonder. It lingers, long after the whole opera. But so too does the whole opera, long after its last memory audibly resonant in chambers suddenly piquant and illumined, spontaneously reissuing whole spells and chords, fiery with sequence. The opera is over. It’s about to begin. The same characters, now a few centuries old. The curtain rises, as the overture ends. Enter Leporello, solo. His throat throttles. The words sing out. Hours later, the final chorus, and the full orchestra. The latest ending, till the next beginning, somewhere. They can’t ever stop it. Reputation excels in repetition. New performers, to carry on our grandest ghost. Dragging along its used-up plot. The silence dances, drowned to bits by the sounds that ache, novel but familiar, a drama set to music. Or music filled out, on a few bare bones of theater in the crude Bland pegs, for hats rarely plumed, to an insane vocal flourish. Logic, overwrought. Sense, sewed up in heard thought.

(More humming of bars:) All that took place in Spain, which was a musical country located in the composer’s brain, Mozart by name. The dancing music hasn’t come down yet . . . It’s poised, in the endless air. And its airs put on new heirs, for posterity.

Okay, enough praise. We’ve heard this opera enough times, all right. Let’s forget the unforgettable music. Come on—the party!

Yes, but are we dressed for it?

Oh, we only need to come as we are.

As we are? But we’re not casual, we’re in formal dress.

(Offhandedly:) Who the devil cares?

(They leave for the party.)