I’m delighted to see that the D.C. Opera’s next two productions are both excellent pieces of music and works of classical liberal polemic.

First up is Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which, when they make an operatic version of the movie High Fidelity will doubtless be on the narrator’s all-time “top five” list. The libretto is by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who never missed an opportunity to inject liberal ideas into works that were, perhaps ironically, largely entertainment for the elite. As with the villain of La nozze di Figaro, the title aristocrat is made out as a shameless nihilist who uses his stature and refinement to bed young ingenues. I saw the Zeffirelli production of this one a few years back at the Metropolitan Opera when I lived in New York. It was fantastic, of course—like sex and pizza, even a bad Giovanni is pretty good, and this wasn’t a “bad” version by a longshot—but Zeffirelli’s trademark is over-the-top, ostentatious staging. That’s great for an opera like Turandot, but seems a little out of place in Giovanni, sort of like an arrangement of the Requiem for kazoo and accordion. So I’m interested to see what the D.C. Opera’s John Pascoe will do with it.

The other performance Iâ??m itching to catch, coming in May, is Beethoven’s sole opera, Fidelio. This one is a bit more overtly political, a tale of corruption and abuse of power that the Opera’s site bills as “Beethoven’s salute to Freedom.” This one I haven’t seen before, and I’ll have to make a trip to the record store (why do we still call it that? Most of them don’t sell records anymoreâ?¦) to pick up a copy soon in preparation.