I’ve been told that one reads “ Don Quichotte ” three times in life: in one’s twenties to laugh, in one’s forties to think, and in one’s sixties to cry. This saddening saying reflects the multivocal quality of the Chevalier of La Mancha’s myth: painfully delusional and carnally human, his hallucinatory deeds are metaphors that represent us all. Jules Massenet’s “Don Quichotte” is less Cervantes’s than Jacques Le Lorrain’s—more romantic, and less comic.
Nevertheless, there is still much space for comedy. Stage director Damiano Michieletto , however, embraced the fragility of the hero’s saga in a staging that materializes the life of a mentally challenged soul and the struggles of masculinity. It is a very, very sad opera after all.
Now all the setting happens in a plastic representation of a 1950s apartment. Quichotte, perhaps a prep-school teacher, works on his poetry while taking psychiatric medications that either constrain his hallucinations or on the contrary produce them. Sancho—here, more a partner-in-life than a servant—runs the house while witnessing his beloved losing his mind.
Never has the famous couple been queerer than in this production; on the other hand, their friendship seems so intimate, and Sancho’s devotion so honest, that is hard to tell the nature of their love. One confronts an ambiguity familiar from Victorian documents and texts: heartfelt professions of devotion that, to ears attuned to language after gay liberation,.