Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, performs 'The Musical World of Don Quixote'

Don Quixote’s madness is probably the commonest of all mental ailments — the delusion we can impose a fantasy on the world. Talented people are particularly susceptible. Young writers and composers yield to the fantasy they can pursue a writing or composing career. Doctors and generals live dreams based on the books and TV shows they consumed in their youth.

Centuries-old superhero

We can even succumb to modern equivalents of the medieval fantasies that befogged Don Quixote. A modern Don Quixote might put on a Batman costume and roam the streets in search of the Joker.

Near the end of their musical odyssey, Piffaro pulled the audience into a sample of the literature that unhinged the Don. Instrumental and vocal music, aided by brief supertitles, told the story of a knight who rescued his wife from captivity with the Moors. The core of the music was an irresistible throbbing solo on an oversize tambourine, played by guest percussionist Glen Velez. The pulse and pace of the storytelling created a vivid reminder that we can all be seduced by romanticized violence.

But there’s more to Cervantes’s novel than the misadventures of a madman. Don Quixote wanders through a 16th-century world depicted by a writer who started life as the son of a nomadic barber-surgeon. By the time he wrote his signature work, Cervantes had been a soldier who fought in one of the great battles of his time; a captive who spent five years as a Moorish slave; a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada; and a tax collector.

Piffaro’s musical portrait of the Don’s world included his encounters with a wedding, church services, galley slaves, puppeteers, peasants, prostitutes, and hog gelders. The musical numbers ranged from country dances to the religious solemnities that accompanied the good knight’s death. Piffaro captured the essence of the story and placed it in the day-to-day world in which its author lived.

Bringing the novel to life

Piffaro’s musicians play approximately 50 different Renaissance musical instruments and they usually stop between sets when they change instruments. For this production, Piffaro brought in a major choreographer, Christopher Williams. Williams’s choreography included dances and a stylized sword fight, but he and stage director Leland Kimball mostly maintained a continuous flow.

Christa Patton is the only harpist in the known world who doubles as a bagpiper. In this production, she actually got up from her harp, bagpipe in hand, and joined the bagpipers without a break.

Thanks to a large grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Piffaro brought in several high powered guests, in addition to Williams and Glen Velez. The New York Polyphony vocal quartet produced clear, light harmonies. Their bass, Craig Phillips, sang the solos associated with Don Quixote with a full, expressive voice. Soprano Nell Snaidas contributed some touching songs and added bits of acting and mime to sequences such as the rescue of the Moorish captive. There was no balcony in the stage area but I’m certain I saw her standing on one when the supertitles said she was.

Piffaro served wine in the aisles and merged the intermission with the wedding that opened the second act. When I talked to people I knew, I discovered almost no one had actually read Don Quixote. I’ve only read it myself because a friend taught Romance Languages at Penn and he talked me into reading it so I could give one of his Spanish seminars a writer’s view of the book.

Yet all of us know who the Don is. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have escaped from their book and taken on a life of their own. We know them from visual works like Dore’s illustrations; music like Telemann’s Don Quixote Suite; and uncountable literary references. Piffaro has given them a new incarnation, clothed in the music of their own time played on the instruments they would have been familiar with. Piffaro’s first concert of the season was also one of the major events of the season.

To read our three-part series on the making of The Musical World of Don Quixote, and ongoing exhibitions related to the concert, click here.