CLASSICAL 89 AIRING UTAH OPERA’S DON GIOVANNI  BY WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART MAY 27 AT 8PM

CAST & ARTISTIC STAFF SYNOPSIS HOME

UTAH OPERA

Don Giovanni
By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
May 10, 12, 14, 16 at 7:30 pm
May 18 at 2:00 pm
Capitol Theatre
Sung in Italian with English supertitles
Libretto by LORENZO DA PONTE
Supertitles translated by Kathleen Lowe
World Premiere: Estates Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787
Previously at Utah Opera in 1984, 1990, 1997

OPERA COMMENTARY

“How do you like your Giovanni?”
by Paula Fowler

Lorenzo da Ponte and Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is at once absolutely enticing and utterly perplexing.  Mozart’s graceful, compelling arias give a nobility to all of his characters, and his finales are still the extended, multi-layered musical bonanzas with which he amazed audiences in Le Nozze di Figaro. The story of Giovanni is filled with conflict and passion, with thwarted as well as reciprocated love, and with comedy.  Da Ponte and Mozart liked this complexity.  They described Don Giovanni as a “dramma giocosa,” or “playful drama,” in which the full spectrum of human emotion and experience blend.

Da Ponte and Mozart keep their scenes swinging between dramatic extremes.  Considered one way, Don Giovanni’s story is full of serious drama: it is hinted that he rapes a woman in the first scene, then kills her father, seduces a woman on her wedding day, and is visited by a supernatural creature who banishes him to hell to suffer for his crimes. Seen in this light, Don Giovanni’s own story is definitely not a “playful” part of this “dramma giocosa.” The lighter elements are mostly provided by Giovanni’s servant Leporello, who is a descendent of commedia dell’arte’s Harlequin.  He is the comic sidekick stereotype from stories about buddies and their adventures, like Sancho Panza in Cervante’s Don Quixote, or Dandini in Rossini’s La Cenerentola.   His ‘pattering’ scenes provide clear comic relief after more dramatic scenes featuring other characters.   The extremes of emotion encapsulated in these adjacent scenes gave Mozart the opportunity to make dramatic shifts in musical styles that are surprising, often jarring, and always riveting.

Audiences for this opera might be caught off guard by some of these huge and sudden shifts; they’ll also be kept curious because of ambiguities in the story’s plot.  A director for this opera—like a director for any production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—has much to interpret as she puts this dense piece to stage, starting with a guiding concept of the title character.  Does she show Giovanni as simply a spoiled aristocrat whose wealth and opportunity have allowed him to flout conventional morality? Giovanni is a licentious nobleman who successfully seduces practically every woman to whom he takes a moment’s fancy. He lives to feed his sensual pleasures.  When he sings “Viva la libertà!” in the Act I Finale, it is an anthem to his own deity, the god of absolute freedom. 
Our director could lead us to dislike this spoiled brat.  Such direction would make clear that the Don did rape Donna Anna in the first scene, no question about it.  Our detestation of him would only grow as we watch him victimize every character until we rejoice that in the Act II Finale, Heaven lends a cold hard hand in the form of a living graveyard Statue that flings the vile thing to hell—ostensibly for his ‘murder’ of Donna Anna’s father, but really for his licentious lifestyle. The Statue (aka the Stone Guest) demands that Don Giovanni repent and change his life, but the rake refuses.  So demons take him, and we can wipe our hands of him, singing with his now-avenged victims their cheerful and snide moral: a one-way trip to hell awaits all evil-doers.  This justice-done “morality play” interpretation is one way of presenting this opera.

But the plot details and the music create a much more complicated story, and a director has to attend to all of the evidence. Da Ponte and Mozart portray Don Giovanni as an irresistible creature as well as a rule-flouting libertine.  He is clever and quick-witted, he slips miraculously out of every tight situation, and he’s a dreamy baritone who knows how to seduce a woman at a window or her wedding with a lovely serenade.  His attractiveness to women is particularly evidenced by the fact that Donna Elvira, who had a three-day relationship with him in another town, is tracking down the ‘monster’ because she can’t get over him—she wants revenge, then she wants to save him, and ultimately, she just wants him back.

Preceding that scene, Don Giovanni gives orders for preparing for the party in “Finch ‘han dal vino.” This aria encapsulates in music the Don’s bounding zest for sensual experience:  in this breathless, speedy, dizzy number, he spins off instructions to Leporello about music, food, wine and women.  He even orders the dances that end up occurring simultaneously in a whirlwind of activity. All the people come to his party to let the playboy spend his wad on them, and to dip a finger in his fire. 
The legend of Don Juan (Giovanni) would not have had currency for the past 400 years if he hadn’t been alluring, and if something in his story weren’t resonant of larger meaning.

The original Don Juan Tenorio on whom all the legends are based allegedly lived in Seville during the 14th century.  The first story of his adventures in print, which da Ponte consulted in his writing, was Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de piedra.  The Don Juan story was also a favorite in the following centuries of “commedia dell’arte” players in Italy, and Molière used these versions as a source for his 1665 Le Festin de Pierre, as did opera composer Goldoni in his 1736 version.  The libretto by Bertati of Gazziniga’s one-act opera of February 1787 was a direct source for da Ponte.  It was current and contemporary, only months old, when da Ponte drew liberally from its text for the Mozart opera first performed in Prague at the end of October of the same year.  Don Juan’s adventures with women, danger, and the Stone Guest live on in all these retellings (including later ones by Lord Byron and G. B. Shaw).

Near the opera’s end, when the stone statue of Donna Anna’s father comes to life to accept Giovanni’s whimsical invitation to dinner, the genre of the opera shifts out of realism.  That change elevates the conflict from a skirmish between Don Giovanni and his victims to a battle royal between larger forces, for whom Don Giovanni and the Stone Guest are but symbols.  Here is a confrontation between license and social order, living in total freedom vs. living within the society’s rules for effective community functioning.  These are forces each of us experiences.  Ahh for the life filled with pleasure, ohhh for glutting our senses.  We all dream of living with abandon, else what are cruises for?  But we also know that to live in a society and to benefit from and enjoy the give-and-take of human community, we have to agree to live by the laws, some of them unspoken that fit in the category of “plain human decency.”  Most of us choose to live within those lines, so I suppose we should feel some kind of triumph when our symbolic representative, the Stone Guest, prevails easily over the symbol of freedom and sensuality.

After the Stone Guest finishes his business with Don Giovanni, the other characters retreat to their socially-acceptable lives—all safely within the box—everybody back to coloring inside the lines—and we get a charming little opera buffa sextet that attempts to return us to the world.  It’s just not enough to get me to forget the powerful preceding scene, and the squeeze it put on freedom and sensuality. 

Mozart’s Don Giovanni was produced in Vienna half a year after its premiere in Prague. When the Emperor heard it, he proclaimed, “The opera is divine, perhaps even more beautiful than Figaro, but it is no food for the teeth of my Viennese.”  Mozart replied, “Let us give them time to chew!”  We too will need time to mull over our experience with a performance of this opera.  What story did the director tell us?  Did we deplore Don Giovanni, and to what extent do we find him charismatic, and what he represents appealing?  Do we live bound by conventional morality…do we wish for a more sensual life?  Start chewing now.