Munich Opera Festival (2) - Don Giovanni, 23 July 2016

Nationaltheater, Munich

Don Giovanni – Erwin Schrott

Commendatore – Ain Anger
Donna Anna – Albina Shagimuratova
Don Ottavio – Pavol Breslik
Donna Elvira – Dorothea Röschmann
Leporello – Alex Esposito
Zerlina – Eri Nakamura
Masetto – Brandon Cedel
Old Man – Ekkehard Bartsch

Stephan Kimmig (director)

Katja Haß (set designs)
Anja Rabes (costumes)
Benjamin Krieg (video)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Stellario Fagone)

Bavarian State Orchestra
James Gaffigan (conductor)

All told, this was probably the best Don Giovanni I have seen and heard. Judging opera performances – perhaps we should not be ‘judging’ at all, but let us leave that on one side – is a difficult task: there are so many variables, at least as many as in a play and a concert combined, but then there is the issue of that ‘combination’ too. At any rate, whilst not every aspect might have been the ‘very best ever’ – how could it be? – all was of a very high standard, and much was truly outstanding. I even began to think that the wretched ‘traditional’ Prague-Vienna composite version might for once be welcome; it was not, yet, given the distinction of the performances, the dramatic loss was less grievous than on almost any other occasion I have experienced.

 

If Daniel Barenboim’s Furtwänglerian reading in Berlin in 2007 remains the best conducted of my life, there was nothing whatsoever to complain about in James Gaffigan’s direction of the score. It was certainly a far more impressive performance than a Vienna Figaro last year, which led me to wonder how much was to be ascribed to other factors, not least the truly dreadful production; perhaps, on the other hand, Don Giovanni is just more Gaffigan’s piece. The depth and variegation of the orchestral sound was second, if not quite to none, than only to Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin. This was far and away the best Mozart playing I have heard in Munich. Even if the alla breve opening to the Overture were not taken as I might have preferred, and certain rather rasping brass concerned me at the opening, I find it difficult to recall anything much to complain about after that; nor do I have any reason to wish to try. Tempi were varied, well thought out, and above all considered in relation to one another. Terror and balm were equal partners: on that night in Munich, we certainly needed them to be.

 

This was, I think, Stephan Kimmig’s first opera staging, first seen in 2009. I shall happily be corrected, but I am not aware of anything since. If so, that is a great pity, for the intelligence of which I have heard tell in his ‘straight’ theatre productions – alas, I have yet to see any of them – is certainly manifest here. There are, above all, two things without which an opera staging cannot survive: a strong sense of theatre and a strong sense of intellectual and dramatic coherence. Equally desirable is, of course, at least something of an ear for music, and coordination between pit, voices, and stage action seemed to me splendidly realised too.

 

A perennial lament of mine concerning Don Giovanni productions concerns refusal or inability to understand it as a thoroughly religious work. Here, there is certainly some sense of sin; its relationship to atheistic heroism is, just as it should be, complex. And the reappearance of the Commendatore and (excellent) chorus at the end, some, including the Stone Guest himself, in clerical garb, reminded us, without pushing the matter, that authority is at least partly religious here. There are other forms of authority too – Don Ottavio’s ever-mysterious reference to the authorities perhaps intrigues us more than it should, or perhaps not – and they are also represented: military berets, business suits, and so forth. A libertine offends far more than the Church; and of course, the Church as an institution has always been many things in addition to Christian (to put it politely).

 

Katja Haß’s set designs powerfully, searchingly evoke the liminality of Da Ponte’s, still more Mozart’s Seville. The drama is not merely historical, although it certainly contains important historical elements. But above all, there is a labyrinth – one I am tempted to think of as looking forward to operas by Berg, even Birtwistle, perhaps even the opera that Boulez never wrote – in which all manner of masquerading may take place. Social slippage and dissolution – above all the chameleon-like abilities of the (anti-)hero – need such possibilities, which are present here, in abundance, in a setting that both respects traditional dramatic unities and renders them properly open to development. A warehouse, containers revolving, opening and closing, changing and remaining the same, provides the frame. Yet we are never quite sure what will be revealed, languages of graffiti transforming, never quite cohering, Leporello’s catalogue – and, more to the point, its implications – foreseen, shadowed, recalled. There is butchery – literally – to be seen in the carcasses from which the Commendatore emerges. There is glitzy – too glitzy – glamour in the show Giovanni puts on to dazzle the peasantfolk; but it does its trick, coloured hair and all.

 

And there is an Old Man, observer and participant, sometimes there, sometimes not. Everyman? The nobleman, had he outstayed his welcome, not accepted the invitation? He is clearly disdained, even humiliated (what a contrast, we are made to think, almost despite ourselves, between his naked body and the raunchy coupling – or more – around him). That is, when he is seen at all: and that is, quite rightly, as much an indictment of the audience as of the characters onstage. Part of what we are told, it seems, is that this is a drama of the young, who have no need of the elderly. Not for nothing, or so I thought, did Alex Esposito’s Leporello exaggerate his caricatured sung response to Giovanni’s elderly women.

 

It is, then, an open staging: suggestive rather than overtly didactic. In a drama overflowing with ideas, that is no bad thing at all. Coherence is, whatever I might have implied above, always relative; the truest of consistency will often if not always come close to the dead hand of the Commendatore. For this was a staging that had me question my initial assumptions: again, something close to a necessity for intelligent theatre. (I assume that the bovine reactions from a few in the stalls were indicative of a desire for anything but.)

 

If religion lies at the heart of the opera, too little acknowledged, perhaps at least a little too little here too, then so does sex. Sorry, ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, but there you have it; this really is not an opera for you, but then what is? Don Giovanni and Don Giovanni ooze – well, almost anything and everything you want and do not want them to. They certainly did here, which is in good part testament to this superlative cast. Erwin Schrott’s Giovanni may be a known quantity – I have certainly raved about it before, more than once – but it was no less welcome and no less impressive for that. ‘Acting’ and singing were as one. He held the stage as strongly as I have ever seen – which means very strongly indeed – and his powers of seduction were as strong as I have ever seen – which means, as I said… His partnership with Esposito’s Leporello was both unique and yet typical of the dynamically drawn relationships between so many of the characters on stage. Leporello was clearly admiring, even envious of his master; their changing, yet not quite, of clothes and identities was almost endlessly absorbing its erotic, yet disconcerting charge. Esposito brought as wide a range of expressive means to his delivery of the text as any Leporello, Schrott included, I remember. Their farewell was truly shocking, Giovanni picking up his quivering servant from the floor, kissing him for several spellbinding seconds, then wiping his mouth clean on his sleeve and spitting contemptuously on the floor. It was time finally to accept the Commendatore’s invitation, issued with grave, deep musicality by the flawless Ain Anger.

 

I had seen Pavol Breslik as Don Ottavio before. There could have been no doubting the distinction of his performance in Berlin, under Barenboim, although neither artist was helped by the non-production of Peter Mussbach. Here, however, Breslik presented, in collaboration with the production, perhaps the most fascinating Ottavio I have seen – and no, that is not intended as faint praise. This was a smouldering counterpart to Giovanni, unable to keep his hands off Donna Anna, and frankly all over her during her second-act aria. Their pill-popping – he supplied the pills – opened up all manner of possibilities, not least given the frank sexuality of their, and particularly his, reactions. The beauty of Breslik’s tone, silken-smooth in his arias, added an almost Così fan tutte-like agony to the violent proceedings. In Albina Shagimuratova, we heard a Donna Anna of the old school: big-boned, yet infinitely subtle, her coloratura a thing of wonder. Combined with the uncertainty of her character’s development – again, most intriguingly so – this was again a performance both physically to savour and intellectually to relish.

 

So too was that the case with Dorothea Röschmann’s Donna Elvira. Her portrayal – Kimmig’s portrayal – would certainly not have pleased, at least initially, those for whom this is in large part a misogynistic work. (It seems to me that they misunderstand some, at least, of what is going on, but that is an argument for another time, and I am only too well aware that it is not necessarily a claim that I, as a man, should be advancing anything other than tentatively.) Downtrodden, yet beautifully sung, in the first act, she nevertheless came into her defiant own in the second, above all through the most traditionally operatic of means: sheer vocal splendour. What a ‘Mi tradì’ that was!

 

Eri Nakamura gave the finest performance I have heard from her as Zerlina, seemingly far more at home in Mozart than when I heard her at Covent Garden. This was a Zerlina who both knew and did not know what she was doing – as a character, of course, not as a performance. And finally, Brandon Cedel’s portrait in wounded, affronted, unconscious yet responsive masculinity proved quite a revelation: I do not think any Masetto has made me think so much about his role in the drama. Nor can I think, offhand, of any Masetto so dangerously attractive – again, like Ottavio, in some sense an aspirant Giovanni, but one still more incapable of being so. Morally, of course, that is to the character’s credit – but in this most ambiguous of operas, and in this most fruitfully ambiguous of productions, one was never quite sure.  

Don Giovanni, Royal Opera, 14 February 2014

 

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Leporello – Alex Esposito

Donna Anna – Malin Byström
Don Giovanni – Mariusz Kwiecień
Commendatore – Alexander Tsyambalyuk
Don Ottavio – Antonio Poli
Donna Elvira – Véronique Gens
Zerlina – Elizabeth Watts
Masetto – Dawid Kimberg

Kasper Holten (director)

Es Devlin (set designs)
Luke Halls (video)
Anja Vang Kragh (costumes)
Bruon Poet (lighting)
Sine Fabricis (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Nicola Luisotti (conductor)

 

When, a fortnight ago, this production of Don Giovanni opened at the Royal Opera House, it seemed to have created uproar. Whilst I should have liked to go without hearing anything about it, that seemed well-nigh impossible in this case. From some of the comments, one would have thought that the love-child of Frank Castorf and Hans Neuenfels had been delivered – not that I should necessarily have minded that at all. I can only assume that half the audience must have been made up of a UKIP convention, having somehow found time to rest its collective eyes from perusing the latest pensées of Jan Moir and Melanie Phillips. What I saw was not only a thoughtful, intelligent, coherent staging, but actually if anything rather a ‘traditional’ one.

 

The premise of Kasper Holten’s production is interesting, yet hardly ‘difficult’. Don Giovanni is not merely imagining his story, but in a sense writing it. Though not identical, there is perhaps some kinship here with Holten’s Copenhagen Ring, in which Brünnhilde discovers ‘her’ story. In any case, the idea is not thrust in one’s face, and one could probably leave it to one side, should one wish. Was it, then, the projections which so offended? It is difficult to understand how or why. Aside from inscribing the names of some of Giovanni’s conquests upon the walls, they simply offer an elegant solution to the problem of shifting scenes. Doubtless this might have been accomplished through multiple scene changes, but the sense of an unchanging framework – Giovanni’s ego? – transformed according to circumstance, whim, and narrative would thereby have been lost. Perhaps most dramatically – in a true rather than sensationalist sense – this was accomplished through the creation of a labyrinth, not at all inappropriate to Mozart’s second-act music, straining as it is towards the Second Viennese School, Berg in particular. (Doubtless UKIP would not like that, but then it would probably be happier with the collected works of Eric Coates – or perhaps Dame Vera Lynn.) The great sextet works splendidly, characters compartmentalised, confused, attempting yet failing to make their ways out, agency of their own undermined by the central character’s control – but is it control? – of the narrative. The shift of the action to the nineteenth century might worry some, I suppose, but it is hardly Calixto Bieito – his still the best staging I have seen in the theatre of this work – and  added a layer of reminiscence to the conception of narrative, itself perhaps reminiscent of Holten’s Onegin as well as his Ring. These, I hesitate, are my readings; they may well not have been the director’s, but that openness to reading seems to me in itself a virtue of the staging.

 

I have one major reservation, concerning the ending. Not the Stone Guest Scene and its aftermath as such: they are well handled, leaving Giovanni on stage alone to cope with the existential devastation of his own creation, that issue of ‘creation’, be it of the self, of others, of narrative, an important point throughout. The ‘moral’ is sung from the pit, whilst he breaks down, Hell being the ‘written’ voices in his head. In this context, I can understand why Holten might have considered cutting the first part of the scena ultima; it indeed makes some sense in terms of his concept. It should probably, however, have been reconsidered. Contrary to the nonsense one spectacularly uninformed journalist – I wrote to him to point this out, but he did not dignify me with a response – was spouting, there is absolutely no precedent for this in Mozart’s own practice, such as we know it. For it was not the case that the scene was omitted entirely. (That may have happened in Vienna in 1788; we simply do not know.) Nor did the performance adopt the possibility of a cut within the scene, running from ‘Ah! certo è l’ombra che m’incontrò!’ to ‘Resti dunque quel birbon’, there being four ‘new’ bars, marked Andante, to facilitate that transition. Rather it sounded as if, in recorded music terms, we had simply skipped a track. In a production that often shows itself alert to the score as well as to the text, this was a pity – but a revival will offer occasion to reconsider. There is also the matter of the typical dreadful conflation of Vienna and Prague versions earlier on: regrettable, certainly, but sadly typical of most stagings. It really is time for directors and, still more conductors, to stand up to singers, audiences, whoever else might be longing for extra arias, however heart-rendingly beautiful, and say no; the drama must come first.

 

I had also been led by many to believe that something outlandish was to be offered by Nicola Luisotti. Now this was not Barenboim or Muti, let alone Klemperer or Furtwängler. But it was for the most part a well conducted, stylish performance. There were occasions when tension sagged, sadly more than a little during the oddly fire-less – and I do not mean to invoke the unlamented Francesca Zambello here! – Stone Guest Scene. But there was a sense of a greater whole, tempi were mostly sensible, and there was the most part a welcome degree of flexibility. Mozart’s music was certainly not harried. The strings played sweetly, the woodwind players often magically euphonious. Even when Luisotti took decisions from which I might have dissented, for instance, in reducing the strings for ‘Ah, fuggi, il traditor!’ there was discernible reason for his choice, likewise for his adding harpsichord to the mix here. It was clearly an attempt to highlight the kinship with Handel, even if some of us think that is better left to speak for itself.

 

As for the much-exaggerated continuo madness: well, I should prefer a modern piano to a fortepiano, but I can see no particular harm in offering fortepiano and harpsichord. They offered not only variety but also difference of response to situation, and if Luisotti’s fortepiano playing sometimes drew attention to itself a little too much, I have heard far worse. A strange switching between major and minor – yes, I suppose one could say that it is characteristic of the work as a whole – did little for the end of one recitative, and its deployment there seemed oddly arbitrary, but again, I have heard worse.

 

Mariusz Kwiecień shone in the title role: masculine, effortlessly seductive – it was, after all, his character’s imagination running riot – and unabashedly sexy. It would have been difficult, most likely impossible, for anyone to resist his call. Certainly his womenfolk did not, could not, and that was as much a matter of detailed attention to the libretto as to the musical line, operatic alchemy properly in evidence. Alex Esposito proved an alert, quicksilver Leporello. Malin Byström’s Donna Anna, clearly loving every minute of her seduction, could be somewhat wayward vocally; at its best, however, it was a powerful assumption, which placed the role and its emotional confusion firmly in the Romantic camp of ETA Hoffmann. Véronique Gens seemed to be having something of an off-day as Donna Elvira, one of her recitatives problematical in terms of intonation, though ‘Mi tradì’ itself recovered nicely. Elizabeth Watts was a perky, strong-minded Zerlina, full of her own seductive gifts, as was shown in her interaction with Dawid Kimberg’s contrastingly bluff Masetto. Antonio Poli displayed a sweet-toned tenor as Don Ottavio, though his intonation wandered a little at times. The Commendatore, as sung by Alexander Tsymbalyuk, made his mark well, whilst remaining integrated into the production’s dramatic framework. Choral singing was excellent throughout.

 

Sadly, the biggest problem lay with the audience. If UKIP moral outrage were less in evidence, boorish behaviour certainly remained. The bar is low, I admit, but this must have been one of the worst-behaved audiences I have yet encountered in the house. Coughing levels suggested a tuberculosis epidemic. Those I could see all around me made no effort to stifle their outbursts; I shall be fortunate indeed if I have not succumbed myself by this evening. Their chattering was, if anything, worse still, likewise the sweet-wrapper opening, and the strange, quite un-erotic groping I was compelled to witness in front of me. But the nadir came when the Catalogue Aria had to pause for a minute whist a gang of morons applauded in the middle.  Luisotti should, admittedly, have pressed ahead, but the fault was not really his. How difficult is it to understand that the first rule of attending a performance, and indeed of social interaction in general, should be to show consideration for others? This is not a matter of some mysterious ‘concert etiquette’, as contrarians would have it; it is what any decent human being would do, whether on a train, in a bus queue, or at the opera. Perhaps we need to move to a Stasi-like system in which behaviour is monitored and miscreants are barred from the premises…

Don Giovanni, Royal Opera, 16 February 2012

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Don Giovanni – Erwin Schrott
Leporello – Alex Esposito
Donna Anna – Carmela Remigio
Donna Elvira – Ruxandra Donose
Don Ottavio – Pavol Breslik
Zerlina – Kate Lindsey
Masetto – Matthew Rose
Commendatore – Reinhard Hagen

Francesca Zambello (director)
Bárbara Lluch (revival director)
Maria Bjørnson (designs)
Paul Pyant (lighting)
William Hobbs (fight director)
Stephen Mear (movement)

Images: Royal Opera/Mike Hoban
(except where otherwise stated)
Don Giovanni (Erwin Schrott) and Donna Anna
(Carmela Remigio)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Constantinos Carydis (conductor)


For those whose operatic priorities lie firmly and indeed exclusively in the realm of singing, there would have been enough here to satisfy: not necessarily something to be taken entirely for granted, given the compromised vocalism one sometimes endures. But, even assuming that one could somehow disregard one of the noisiest, most ill-behaved audiences I have had the misfortune to experience at Covent Garden, a person with even the slightest interest in opera as drama would have been sorely disappointed. It frankly beggars belief that, especially for so popular a work, Francesca Zambello’s production was not retired after a single outing, for rarely in my experience has there been such critical unanimity about any staging of any opera. Doubtless revival director Bárbara Lluch did what she could, and there were even signs in the first act that the deep-frozen corpse might occasionally be twitching in the direction of the merely comatose. Nevetheless, Zambello’s production remained as vacuous as any opera production I can recall. Its one glimmer of an idea turns out to be nothing of the sort: religious imagery remains nothing more than religious tat. And that, despite ludicrous hairstyles and the bizarre pointing hand, is it. Faced with a re-dramatisation of the Fall, pre-emption of Mephistopheles, one of the greatest scores ever written, etc., etc., there comes nothing in response. Don Giovanni, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, seems to present almost insuperable difficulties to contemporary directors; the only two I can recall emerging with relative honour in the theatre are Graham Vick at Glyndebourne and Calixto Bieito at ENO. Yet even the most perverse concept, even the most unclear, such as that Roland Schwab recently served up for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, would be preferable to nothing at all. Has Zambello ever read Da Ponte, let alone Mozart? If so, that only serves to render her ‘response’ the more pitiful. Her similarly ideas-free Carmen just about works on as straightforward level of response as one can muster, but this, like Giovanni himself, lies utterly beyond redemption.

It would be vain to claim that the directorial context held no implications for the vocal performances, but the singers almost all emerged with considerable credit, the sole disappointment being a woolly Masetto from Matthew Rose. Erwin Schrott’s Giovanni was beautifully sung and as well acted as one had any right to expect, yet even the darkness of his tone at its best sounded less dangerous than it had when he took the role in the same production in 2007. He could be readily forgiven for simply having had enough, though he would doubtless have been delighted by the support of Anna Netrebko from the audience. Alex Esposito is a fine Leporello, as he managed to show even in the aforementioned Berlin staging, but here too often he was forced to play the clown: a wasted opportunity, though he nevertheless managed to shine in the Catalogue Aria. Carmela Remigio proved an intelligent Donna Anna: no mean feat in context. What she achieved vocally, with fine command of line and ever-welcome ease in her native tongue, fully vindicated the faith placed in her by no less a conductor than Claudio Abbado. Ruxandra Donose actually seemed more at ease than she had in Berlin; again she did vocally what she could. Kate Lindsey was a spirited Zerlina, if perhaps sometimes too saucy for Mozartian style (though one could hardly blame her for attempting something, indeed anything, to alleviate the directorial tedium). Bar an unfortunate and highly-exposed scooping up to the note in ‘Il mio tesoro’ – the much- and justly-maligned ‘traditional’ conflation of Vienna and Prague was employed – Pavol Breslik made an attractive-toned Don Ottavio. Reinhard Hagen, despite a truly absurd tempo forced upon him, managed to make the Commendatore’s words during the Stone Guest scene at least count for something.

Don Ottavio (Pavol Breslik)

To begin with, I wondered whether the well-nigh uniformly negative criticism – from the first of the two casts – of Constantinos Carydis’s conducting had been unfair. The Overture was far too fast, in both sections; indeed, there was no discernible change of tempo between them. But thereafter for a while there was greater variation than I had been led to expect. If hardly Colin Davis or Daniel Barenboim, let alone Busch, Giulini, or Furtwängler, I had heard considerably worse. There was even some sensitively shaped handling of orchestral recitative, something not to be taken entirely for granted in an age with a dearth of Mozart conductors. But early relative promise dissipated, the end of the first act finale falling flatter than I have ever heard. It was not a matter of the climax running away with itself, as one might expect; there simply was no climax. The music stopped, and that was the end of that. What one might politely call eccentrically fast tempi became, if not quite the norm, than depressingly frequent in the second act, yet the effect was not hyperactive but inert. The appearance of the Stone Guest was somehow – and not just on account of the production – utterly inconsequential, Mozart’s chords skated over as if they were nothing, or worse than nothing: something out of Philip Glass, perhaps. The epilogue was as ruinously hard-driven as any Mozart performance I have encountered. Carydis’s singers and even some in the audience deserved far, far better.

Don Giovanni, Deutsche Oper, Berlin, 29 October 2010

(Photos: Marcus Lieberenz im Auftrag der DEUTSCHEN OPER BERLIN)

Don Giovanni – Ildebrando d’Arcangelo
Donna Anna – Marina Rebeka
Don Ottavio – Yosep Kang
Donna Elvira – Ruxandra Donose
Leporello – Alex Esposito
Masetto – Krzysztof Szumanski
Zerlina – Martina Welschenbach
Commendatore – Ante Jerkunica

Roland Schwab (director)
Piero Vinciguerra (set designs)
Renée Listerdal (costumes)
Silke Sense (choreography)
Andreas KW Meyer, Miriam Konert (dramaturgy)


Movement Choir of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Thomas Richter)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Roberto Abbado (conductor)


This new production was trumpeted as a Don Giovanni for Berlin. Some points in the proclamation were more persuasive than others. In 1954, Brecht inaugurated the new home for his Berliner Ensemble at the Schiffbauerdamm with Molière’s Don Juan, whilst Heiner Müller would follow in those footsteps in 1968. Meanwhile, in West Berlin, a month after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the newly constructed home for the Deutsche Oper would open with Don Giovanni. Fifty years later, and twenty-one years after the Wall’s demise, comes a new production. I am not sure this adds up to a great deal, for one could doubtless point to precedents and numbers of years since something else for just about anything. But Roland Schwab’s production tries to locate itself more explicitly in Berlin: Berlin as a clubbing mecca. Localism seems to be the new, or at least a new, universalism at the moment, as evidenced by Claus Guth’s recent Zurich Tristan and Ariadne auf Naxos. That is, unless a work was actually intended to be set somewhere in particular; it would never do, say, to set Don Giovanni in seventeenth-century Seville, or The Rake’s Progress in Hogarth’s London.

That would not be of much import if the Konzept worked in practice. I think it could; Giovanni is someone who takes himself not only to the edge but jumps off the precipice. Much of what happened here, however, seemed more confused than anything else. The beginning I found straightforwardly incomprehensible. We have a sort of gang leader – fair enough, though that inevitably glosses over carefully-crafted distinctions of class or order in libretto and score – and his followers (the Deutsche Oper’s Movement Choir, all impeccably well drilled), wandering around and occasionally playing golf. I wondered whether the golf were intended to be symbolic, since it seems an unusual preparation for all-weekend partying, but I could not conceive of what it might be symbolic. When women come along, Giovanni hands them score cards: seven for Donna Anna, six for Donna Elvira, five for Zerlina. Are aces high or low? Who knows? The action eventually shifts to the realm of the night, our substitute for Giovanni’s chocolate and prosciutto. Sado-masochistic scenes are enacted, yet not once do they generate the slightest eroticism. Perhaps the intention is simply: épater les bourgeois, bring a taste of the Kreuzberg scene (somewhat dated, I think) to the denizens of Wilmersdorf. In Charlottenburg, it would hardly be difficult to shock, yet so far as I could discern, the outcome was more a matter of mild, prurient interest. At any rate, there was much hearty laughter at Leporello’s slapstick falling over, which seemed to console a good few of the audience. Quite what the brief appearance of a Jesus-look-alike on an exercise bicycle was supposed to connote, I have no idea, likewise the equally brief snapshot for a blasphemous re-enactment of the Last Supper. At the end, I was bewildered once again: Giovanni’s punishment seemed to be a matter of just deserts for too many drugs and staying up late. I do not think that was the intention, but I really could not tell you what was.

Meanwhile, Leporello aside, who on earth were the other characters? Were they bourgeois visitors, curious concerning the Underground scene: the audience, if you like? Perhaps, but whatever it was they were doing most of the time, it seemed to have little connection with the main thrust of the production. One might have thought that would have given a director pause for thought, as to whether the work was being treated appropriately or coherently. That did not seem to concern Schwab, however, for he merely excised bits that he did not like. (I assume that it was his doing rather than the conductor’s.) Elvira had both her arias, but Don Ottavio only had his first. Recitatives were messed around with, either cut or simply placed on hold, whilst further stage action continued. Worst of all, Schwab followed in the footsteps of Claus Guth’s Salzburg production and cut the entire final scene. One would generally have felt short-changed: the music and our ears call for resolution. It had become too late really to care, however, in this instance. Let us not bring in here the red herring of Mahler et al.; their reasons, whatever one thinks of them, for ending where they did were quite different from those of modern-day directors.

What really did for this performance, though, was Roberto Abbado’s conducting, above all during a first act that felt interminable: St François d’Assise without the jokes. It was not so much that he was slow, though often he was, as that there was no life, no direction. Klemperer might have been stately at times, but he brought an implacable integrity that made time fly. The dullness was simply aggravated by the music at times grinding to a halt. Think what an extraordinary score this is, one of the very greatest in all musical drama; here, one would have wondered what all the fuss was about, and might well have drifted off. The end of the first act and the second act were a bit better, but were at best inoffensive. I almost – and I stress ‘almost’ – found myself longing for the odd Harnoncourtism to liven things up. The orchestra did what it could – occasional woodwind moments made one sit up – but it was severely hamstrung. Though the score was cut, the performance lasted about three-and-a-half hours, with a single half-hour interval.

Ildebrando d’Arcangelo had his moments in the title role. The lustre of his tone was not dimmed, but the production hardly played to his strengths. Ruxandra Donose made a game assault upon Elvira, but her voice seemed strained at times; it did not fit her range well, despite transposition (what of Mozart’s carefully planned tonal relations?) Marina Rebeka generally sang well as Anna, though her tone hardened somewhat during her second-act aria, to the detriment of intonation. Yosep Kang’s vocal style seemed more appropriate to Puccini, albeit underpowered Puccini, than to Mozart. The others were fine, without making any particular impression, but again, the production made it extremely difficult for them to do so. The sole exception was Alex Esposito’s excellent Leporello. He may have been asked to do wrongheaded things but no challenge defeated him, whether of voice or of staging. He even managed, during the Stone Guest scene, to keep his line whilst doing a convincing impression of being utterly off his face on drugs. I should love to see – and to hear – him in another production.

Perhaps, then, the moral of the story – since we were denied the moral of the opera – is that the best reason to perform Don Giovanni, indeed the only reason to do so, is for itself, not to commemorate, whether a year or a place. And if one wishes to celebrate the history of the Deutsche Oper, including its forerunner, the Städtische Oper, perhaps it would be best to look to the invaluable programme history of previous incarnations: Furtwängler and Böhm both conducted new productions (1930 and 1953). That truly is a tradition to respect, to honour and to build upon. I was also reminded yet again what an extraordinarily difficult work it is to bring off. Let us see what ENO brings to the dramma giocoso in little more than a week’s time…