Another Encounter with the Don

It is certainly becoming a Mozart opera year so far. And we are not talking about just any opera, but specifically the ones Mozart wrote with Da Ponte. We had seen The Marriage of Figaro in Da Ponte’s hometown of Ceneda earlier in the autumn, and this time we found ourselves in London, at the Garden, for Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Don Giovanni is an opera we have seen several times. We saw it in Monte Carlo in 2015 for , in that mythical Luca Ronconi production which set so many things in motion for so many of the singers involved. And now here we were again, back at the Garden, with Mozart’s dramma giocoso.

I really do think it is perhaps the best thing Mozart ever wrote for the stage. It has everything. And this time, the production had everything too, at least as far as the singing was concerned. The two donne, Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, were particularly outstanding. And Don Giovanni was second to none. Leporello was equally impressive, as was Don Ottavio, the tenor who has those two beautiful arias. Everything was sung with impeccable style.

There is simply so much in Don Giovanni that is wonderful, and so much that has inspired people to write extraordinary essays about it. I am thinking, of course, of Kierkegaard and his famous essay on the opera. It is one of those works that seems to invite endless reflection, however many times you see it or hear it. No wonder that another great operatic composer Verdi always had a copy of it by his piano.

Anyway, it really was amazing. And the audience clearly thought so too. There were some very lively young people sitting behind us who cheered ecstatically when the cast came out to take their bows. It was a pleasure to hear such enthusiasm, especially from a younger generation.

I liked the production itself. I liked the way the sets suggested a series of little rooms, almost like rooms in a toy house, with strange and sometimes unexpected applications of light to pick out particular scenes. There was something slightly unreal about it all, which seemed entirely appropriate for an opera that moves so effortlessly between comedy, tenderness, violence and the supernatural.

And then there was the ending. I thought that finishing in the blackness of Don Giovanni, without the final moral ensemble, was actually the most effective way of bringing the opera to a close. It left us with the darkness of the man himself, rather than with the reassuring moral conclusion that usually follows his descent into hell. It was the opposite conclusion to the one we witnessed at Montecarlo when to the accompaniment of the final ‘moral’ chorus the Don was shown enjoying in a pleasure palace in hell surrounded by lascivious women and attending a scrumptious banquet.

After all, Don Giovanni is a man who, by any modern understanding of the term, would in several respects be a sex offender. We cannot simply brush that aside. The sexual predator was already there in the eighteenth century, if indeed he had not always been there. Mozart and Da Ponte were not writing about some harmless old libertine who happened to have a weakness for women. They were presenting a man whose behaviour has consequences for the people around him, and whose charm does not excuse what he does.

The subtitle, Il dissoluto punito, means precisely that: the dissolute man punished. Yet the opera is so much more complicated than a simple tale of wickedness receiving its just deserts. And perhaps that is one reason why it continues to fascinate us.

For Mozart to have written such an extraordinary work is astonishing. It contains the most tender arias, the most dramatic music, the funniest episodes and some of the darkest moments of anything he ever wrote for the stage. It is difficult to think of another opera that brings all these things together with such extraordinary ease.

And one cannot help wondering what he might have written had he lived longer. What other operas might he have given us? What other worlds might he have opened up? Who knows? Who knows?

We should simply be grateful that he gave us this one.

And we should be grateful, too, that Mozart met Da Ponte, and that the two of them were able to produce this extraordinary sequence of operas together. We had, as I said, encountered Da Ponte again in his own hometown when we went to see The Marriage of Figaro. And now, in a sense, he had accompanied us to London for Don Giovanni.

What an evening! What a wonderful evening.