Don Giovanni

Which is a great opera. It's one of the two Mozart operas that are studied back at Whatsamatta U, switching out with the Magic Flute. After seeing Don Giovanni, I can't see why the other is included at all. One simply spends all one's time saying, "Well, we're in E flat major, the 'Masonic key'," and not getting anywhere. Don Giovanni one can sink one's teeth into, bite off a big chunk, and chew on it for a while.

Let's assume that the singers all did fine, or at least did not offend my untrained ears. Two exceptions: Donna Elvira absolutely nailed "mi tradi quell'alma ingrata", and Don Ottavio seemed self-conscious and uncertain. Which is perhaps not out of character, but it came across as the actor's nervousness. He was a stand-in, not the usual Don Ottavio, but I certainly would have wanted "a little more time" before I married him. Several decades, at least. "Non mi dir", indeed.

Lights up on some red, red brick buildings. Leporello is in a brown leather jacket and hat, and I'd say he was slinking about the place, but the actor is way too bouncy to slink. He looks like a great big brown leather beach-ball, and he's bobbling about stealthily.

Don Giovanni enters with Donna Anna. Am I naive? I never thought that Donna Anna might have been a willing participant in the seduction, but that's how they're playing it. She's all over him like the cheap suit that he is, in fact, wearing. After talking with jack, I can see how it makes sense, with what she says later to Don Ottavio ("I thought it was you"), but for some reason I never conceived of her that way. Perhaps it's just that there's some ambiguity otherwise, and there's certainly none here. Donna Anna, by the way, is showing a lot of skin.

The Commendatore comes in, looking just this side of decrepit, which brings a chuckle from the audience as he swings his sword just like some men of that age drive: slowly, and to no particular end. The production played a lot of scenes for farce which didn't seem to me to be inherently farcical. Leporello, whom I consider to be quite sinister, for all his sarcasm and haplessness, was a stooge. Donna Elvira stomped about the stage with her elbows firmly out, and her encounter with the disguised Leporello involved a great deal of bad touching. She was turned from a woman seduced and scorned into the butt of a joke between Giovanni and the audience, and because of that "mi tradi quell'alma ingrata", while beautifully sung, lacked the emotional foundation to be truly affecting.

I don't know why they chose to play so much of the opera so broadly. It's already funny; I don't need to see Masetto doing the "staircase" behind a hedge, then pulling himself around like a seal, to laugh at his predicament. In fact, the broadness of the playing diminished the tension between the comic aspects of the opera, and the creepier elements just under the surface. Masetto is having his betrothed taken before him, and if we laugh at his attempts to get her back, and at Leporello's antics to prevent him, it's with unease. We're laughing at the destruction of innocence. Mozart may have called it opera buffo, but the libretto has it right: dramma giocoso.

The same with Donna Elvira. Her pursuit of Giovanni is amusing in its obsession, but unless we're convinced that she really does love him, and that her love is worthy of respect, her insistence at the banquet that he repent carries no weight--it's just another attempt to capture him. Playing her as a farcical harridan diminishes Giovanni's wickedness, and thereby diminishes the opera. He's made less mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and we're more comfortable watching him. He loses the power to make us truly worried, and that power is what fascinates us. In this production, even his killing the Commendatore was made off-hand and at least mostly justifiable.

Fortunately, they can't do too much to the music. Don Giovanni shone through the acting in several places. What was really brought home to me as I watched this time was how Giovanni himself leads the opera, musically and dramatically. Even when he's offstage the characters onstage are looking for him, discussing him, in short, reacting to him. He is the only character capable of effective action, with one exception: the Commendatore's statue.

Musically, he's constantly re-interpreting the notes of others into his own key; he takes command whenever he sings with someone else. This technique is his seduction. Even Leporello could call the big ones "majestic" and the little ones "charming". But Giovanni has a presence which is conveyed through his music, and which allows us to understand the power he has. He is always in control of the situation, until the end.

And at the end he's lost it. The Commendatore will not be swayed, and will not allow Giovanni to re-interpret his music. Indeed, the Commendatore's music subsumes Giovanni's, just as Giovanni's spirit is overcome by Hell.

The descent into Hell was well done technically, I thought, with great yellow lights behind the action, nearly blinding one. Giovanni leapt into the pit with a little yelp, but as I said above, he seemed very tired. I'm sure we would have had a truly blood-curdling scream from him otherwise.

But because Giovanni's crimes were downplayed, and he was become a cheerful rake rather than a figure of power, it left me little moved. This Giovanni didn't deserve it, and the opera became a story of hard-hearted law striking down any occupation not its own, which is predictable and well-worn. Here's the paradox: if Giovanni doesn't deserve to be dragged screaming to Hell, I'm not going to be interested enough to watch him. He'll hardly be that figure which so fascinated Goethe and Kierkegaard. He can't seduce if we don't know that his seduction is wrong: the wrongness is the appeal of it. We allow him to convince us, for a little while, to be part of the story that he's telling. And it is a story for which he needs an audience.

Giovanni needs his Leporello not so much for his serving abilities, but as that audience. Leporello, with his little book full of names, stands in for us. He too is watching as the Don makes his next conquest, and when we see his glee at each new woman, we see a little of ourselves reflected in him. Which, if he's not a beach-ball, is disturbing. He's a voyeur and a petty servant, and he willingly serves a murderer and rapist, just to see what comes next (despite all his protestations about money). And we're just the same, watching Giovanni and laughing at the helplessness of those around him. It's only through Leporello that we get any information about Giovanni, who is himself silent on the subject. And no character more than Leporello complements Giovanni muscially. Even his first aria, "Notte e giorno faticar" is, we discover, an echo of his master's "Fich'han dal vino" (or is his master echoing him?).

I wonder if those in charge of the production didn't play it this way because they didn't have faith in their singers' ability to bring off the more difficult task of making us understand the characters. Donna Elvira, when we understand her, becomes a figure of fear and pity. Her very arias are conflicted, and to make us understand the opposing forces in her soul and in her heart requires a great effort. Either the producers lacked faith in their singer, which is doubtful, or they lacked faith in their audience.

And why not? A descent into Hell becomes a cipher if we don't believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. How can you convey the horror of it to an audience that denies its existence (and indeed, these days denying the existence of Hell is the chief spiritual belief people confess)? Still, I would have liked to have seen characters with some dramatic complexity, to accompany their muscial complexity.

Ah, well. It's Mozart. And it's Don Giovanni. How wrong can you go? Nit-picking aside, a fabulous night and a lovely time. "The three finest things in creation are the sea, Hamlet, and Mozart's Don Giovanni," as Flaubert put it. I'd add champagne, but there you go.

UPDATE: I'll be adding online reviews as they come.
Marni really dug on it. Johnny solidarity!