The Day I Picked the Wrong Role Model

Everyone has a hero they idolize in childhood. A Batman, a Wonder Woman, a Mr. Spock, a Huckleberry Finn, an Anne Frank. Sometimes, the adults we become rest on the foundations of those characters we admired most when we were young.

Mine was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, based on the earlier figure of Don Juan.

When I was about seven, my mother and I began a Saturday morning ritual that would last for years: listening to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. I would color and she would read, and at breaks, she would explain the plots of the various operas we were hearing.

Nearly 50 years later, I can remember what the dial of that already ancient Zenith radio felt like beneath my fingers. And I can remember how much I loved these glorious sounds and gripping stories. Even a small child listening to a radio can grasp the extraordinary drama in Vesti la Giubba, and the way my mama, explained the plot of Pagliacci riveted me.  This was real life!

It would be years before I would see a major opera production in San Francisco. My first live performance would be at Carmel’s famous but tiny Hidden Valley theater, which for decades has put on live theater and opera every summer, often using conservatory students in major roles.

Hidden Valley put on two productions every summer.  One would be a minor opera, or something new and avant-garde; the other the most-reliable at putting bottoms in seats: Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

My five-year-old brother was too young to go, and spent the day with my grandmother. It was just mama and me. Mom told me later she was worried I’d be bored or fidget in our front-row seats. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I was transfixed.

My mother had explained the plot several times, and I’d heard a recording, but live opera was as far removed from what I’d heard on our old record player as a picture of a Double Stuff Oreo is from the one into which you’re actually putting into your watering mouth.

The scenery! The lights! The music! The beautiful women! The swords! The singing!

And The Don. I could do the research and find out who sang the part in the summer of 1975; someone on the Monterey Peninsula probably knows.  Perhaps I don’t need to know.

He was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

As I remember him, he was tall, muscular, with long blonde hair that flowed to his shoulders. He wore a white silk ruffled shirt was open nearly to his navel; his chest was smooth. His pants were tight, tucked into black boots. His rapier hung casually from his sword belt.

As the kids say these days, he was everything.

The Don’s duel with the Commendatore was astonishing; someone must have given the pair fencing lessons.

“He didn’t really stab him?” I whispered to my mother.

“Shhh, of course not.”

At intermission, over apple juice in the parking lot, I peppered my mother with questions, particularly about what Don Giovanni was actually doing with all these women to make them so upset. Neither my mother nor I recall her answer to my eight-year-old self.

It didn’t matter. I could see that women wanted Don Giovanni, even if some of them hated him, and men were afraid of him. I liked that.

No, that’s too weak. I craved that.

In retrospect, perhaps this was the earliest moment where I found my own sexuality. I wanted to touch the Don the way the women wanted to. At the same time, I wanted to be him, to touch the women as he did, to be as charismatically ruthless and confident as he so effortlessly was.

Memory is tricky. Perhaps I’m reading that back in after 46 years.

In the second act, the world closes in on Don Giovanni. As he is hemmed in and surrounded by his enemies, he remains defiant. In the penultimate scene, the beautiful Donna Elvira (a petite brunette in my recollection) comes to plead with the Don to change before it’s too late, but he dismisses her.

Everyone is crying or shouting. The Don is laughing. He transcends everyone’s displeasure; the ultimate bad boy who has elevated above consequences.

And then the ghost of the Commendatore arrives. One final chance to repent — and the handsome proud Don makes jokes, toasting the ghost with champagne. The Commendatore stands back. The Don’s fate is sealed.

The demons come next. They are terrifying, walking out of the audience onto the stage. I cannot remember what they looked like because I could not look at them. I watch the Don instead, and I see his courage waver. He draws his sword — then realizes it will be of no use, and lets it clatter to the ground. The demons close in.

In large opera houses with proper stages, it’s common at this point to have the demons drag the Don down to hell through a trap door in the stage. There was no trap door in Hidden Valley. And as long as I live, I’ll never forget the solution they chose.

The Don picks up a candelabra with half a dozen lit tapers. The demons stop. The music swelling, the Don’s fear seems to change to confidence one last time. He begins to pinch out the candles, signifying that he will die on his terms: autonomous, sovereign, and proud to the end.   As he pinches them out, he begins to twirl madly in a widening gyre, until he extinguishes the last flame.

As the last candle goes dark, the Don tumbles down the steps that separate the stage from the audience.

He lands five feet from me. One of the candles rolls, until it stopped at my sneakers.
Through the finale, the Don remained motionless, in shadow.

He doesn’t seem to be breathing. I am vibrating with emotion and panic, and nestle against mama. My mother’s soft whisper only slightly reassures: “He’s not really dead. He’ll get up in a moment, I promise.”

During the thunderous ovation — I leapt to my feet, clapping madly — the Don bounced up for the curtain call. The alacrity and vigor with which he sprung from stillness to life remains my visual response to the word “resurrection.” 

Afterwards, because it was a matinee and Hidden Valley was and is a teaching institution, audience members had an opportunity to meet the cast. I waited patiently for the Don while my mother chatted with friends.

The Don sat on the stage. His shirt and hair were damp with sweat, and he was dabbing at his forehead with Kleenex. He was bleeding. He was a baritone, not a stuntman. Presumably the death tumble off the stage had taken a toll.

He could have been 25 or 45. As far as I was concerned, he was the most amazing man I’d ever seen. I knew that in reality, he was a singer; I knew this story wasn’t real, but I had no way of distinguishing this tired, grinning man from the archetype he’d just awakened inside of me.

“Hi, my name his Hugo Schwyzer. How do you?”

I extended my right hand as I’d been taught. With what might have been mock gravity, the Don shook it.

“How do you do, Hugo Schwyzer.”

“You were really good,” I said. “This is my first opera.”

The Don smiled. “Your first opera? I’m very glad. I hope you’ll see many more.”

Maybe he said that, maybe he didn’t. What happened next will stay with me all the days of my life, because it helps explain my life.

I handed the Don the candle. “This is yours. You dropped it.”

He studied it, twisted it this way and that. And he handed it back.

“Keep it, Hugo Schwyzer. Keep it to remember us.”

His eyes were huge and brown. He winked. And then the Don raised his gaze to smile at the person standing behind me.

I kept that candle for years, until it disappeared, as childhood treasures will.

When I tell my music friends that Don Giovanni is my favorite opera, I often get a look of bemused disappointment. It’s everyone’s favorite. Can’t I pick something more…. Obscure? (I can. Let’s talk the Gluck canon.)  I cannot help but love it for the character of the Don, whose character has been a compass point and an inspiration, usually to my detriment.

And I love it for that man who gave me back a candle and cracked open my world.

He may not be alive, and he wouldn’t remember, but I’d like to ask the man who sang the Don a question that I’ve wrestled with for 46 years. What did he mean when he said the candle was to “remember us”? Did he mean himself and the opera company? Did he mean that I should remember him as the baritone — and the character of the Don? Or did he mean for me to remember the us that was, for a moment, the me and the him?

Perhaps I would have been whom I was going to be had I never heard opera, never seen Don Giovanni, never had that brief encounter with that charismatic baritone.  Perhaps I would still have fallen in love with self-destructiveness; I’ll never know. What I do know is that at many of the most foolish and reckless moments of my life, I have remembered the Don pinching out his own candles, defiant and swaggering until the end.

I watched a lot of television as a boy, and I watched the violent and sexually-charged movies that conservative parents worried would corrupt the minds of the young.  Nothing I saw on screen as a child left any particular mark for good or ill.  An 18th-century opera, based on a far older story, did far more damage - as a dazzled young boy mistook a cautionary tale for instruction, and found in a swashbuckling villain an example of how best to live.

I can’t possibly pick a single aria from the opera to share, but Dmitri Hvorostovsky has been my favorite modern Don. Here he is with the great Renee Fleming, and they’re doing a bang-up job in a concert format, performing the opera’s most famous duet.

Dmitri died much too young of cancer a few years ago. His memory is a blessing.