If Michael Angelo's PIETA is the painting of spirituality and the holiness of a mother's love for her son, then the pix of the late opera-great Dmitrii Hvorostovsky as Don Giovanni is the capture of realism about the plight of humans: Don Juan en route to hell!
Michael Angelo's talent is at its best.
The stage artistry of Dmitrii to bring to life the beauty of Mozart is also at its best!
In Pieta, human artistry is the PERFECT portrayal of PERFECTION, when the narrow passage has opened for humans' heavenly upward nobility, toward the light (or what a Buddhist, in a different epistemology, will name as "enlightenment" or the state of Nirvana). For, what can be more perfect than humans' ennobled yearning for an unbeatable, undying belief in goodness, and what can be more perfect than mother-child selfless love, and selfless sacrifice of the self for the good of others?
On the other hand, in Dimitrii's Don Giovanni, artistry is the PERFECT portrayal of human IMPERFECTION, when the narrow passage has been closed, leaving the doomed human in the darkness called Hell...For, what can be more hellish than a man's realization that he is paying in eternity for the cost of his self-indulgence: the suffering of another human being should NEVER be the source of pleasure for another human being! Again, a Buddhist may call this common-sense principle the wheel of Karma, or the mathematics of cause-effect equalization.
And, perhaps, just perhaps, the whole system of social justice in this life should then be the equalization between the two, on a well-administered scale: the suffering of one human being, on one end, weighted against, on the other end, the benefit enjoyed by another human being who has occasioned such suffering, without remorse!
In a society where technology rules, the only difference between humans and animals or machinery lies in the human ability to make moral decisions and to exercise moral judgement, as Confucius, the teacher of the East, has stated in NINE WORDS: Ky so bat duc vat thi u nhan!
In the portrayal of such anguished struggle lies the beauty of art.
DNN C Nov 27 2017
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