Martha Wydysh '14 reviews Don Giovanni, playing at the Metropolitan Opera and streaming in Ithaca Mall. 

Martha Wydysh '14 reviews Don Giovanni, playing at the Metropolitan Opera and streaming in Ithaca Mall. 

   Few knew that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher and political thinker, wrote an opera; and certainly Friday night's performance at Risley of his single dip into the genre was framed as a sort of well-kept secret from the annals of highbrow history. The Cunning Man, archaic and baroque as it may seem today, was hardly highbrow at the time.

Opera inhabits the larger-than-life world of illusion and fairy-tale; we go expecting sheer fantasias of darkling grandeurs and flights of lovelorn paroxysms. But like Freudian dreamwork, the experience of opera-going may not be to elude reality so much as to enable us to digest the unforetold consequences of a reality that has leached into the mythic shapes of our shadowy under-thoughts.

Ithaca College has chosen two early twentieth century operettas based on fairy-tales for its annual opera production, Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilges. The two productions on the bill, however, could not be more different.