Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 7 June 2014

Don Giovanni (Elliot Madore) and Donna Anna (Layla Claire)
Images: Robert Workman

Glyndebourne Festival Theatre

Leporello – Edwin Crossley-Mercer

Donna Anna – Layla Claire

Don Giovanni – Elliot Madore

Commendatore – Taras Shtonda

Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson

Donna Elvira – Serena Farnocchia

Zerlina – Lenka Máčiková

Masetto – Brandon Cedel

 

Jonathan Kent (director)

Lloyd Wood (revival director)

Paul Brown (designs)

Denni Sayers (movement)

Mark Henderson (lighting)

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Andrés Orozco-Estrada

 

Having become so jaded with indifferent – or, sadly, far worse than merely indifferent – stagings of an opera I love more than words can tell, it proved a relief and indeed a joy for me to attend this first revival of Jonathan Kent’s 2010 Glyndebourne production, especially its first act. It was not perfect; perfection we leave for Mozart. But Kent’s staging, as revived by Lloyd Wood – I am afraid I am in no position to say how much is Kent and how is Wood – treats this masterpiece seriously and joins a select group of productions I should happily see again, not least because I suspect there would be intriguing points revealed to me that I had missed upon a first viewing. (Incidentally, its Glyndebourne predecessor, from Graham Vick, forms part of that small band.)

 

Kent’s staging may lack the cocaine-fuelled kinetic energy of Calixto Bieito’s unforgettable ENO production, or the (apparently) all-encompassing, Calderón-like Salzburg World Theatre of Herbert Graf’s production for Furtwängler (the most precious opera DVD this side of the Boulez-Chéreau Ring?), but even such magnificent achievements as those can only begin to hint at the possibilities Mozart and Da Ponte offer us. Most stagings come nowhere near accomplishing even that. Social tensions are either absent or underplayed – an all too common shortcoming – but a seriousness and sensibility it is perhaps not unduly exaggerated to call theological nevertheless comes to the fore. Giovanni’s unflinching, libertine atheism is of course the true heroism of the opera. The dark force of what to him may be reaction is symbolised by the darkness of Paul Brown’s excellent set designs, from out of which the action seems to emerge and into which it retreats. But some in the audience – and some of the characters too – might equally decide that it is the temporal stability of the revolving cube (the Mother Church, perhaps?) which protects and which ultimately proves the villain’s downfall.

 

 

Such openness to interpretation is quite different from a lack of direction. There is room for the burning conviction of strong directorial lines – Bieito is surely one of the greatest and unquestionably one of the most celebrate examples – and for more reticent yet nevertheless intelligent productions, permitting of various understandings. In that respect, Kent’s likening, in his brief director’s note, of Brown’s spinning cube to ‘a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities or, perhaps, a great sarcophagus,’ proves fruitful both in itself and for the further consideration it might suggest. Moreover, such properly Baroque references, in a more broadly cultural sense rather than the narrow conceptions of ‘style’ prevalent today, prove equally stimulating to the imagination – just as they do in Mozart’s score and Da Ponte’s libretto. The 1950s updating registers if one wishes: Kent suggests a ‘time of transition, in which a sexual, social and moral revolution, a dolce vita world, coexisted with the remnants of a devout society. However, at least to my eyes, it does not force itself unduly upon one’s consciousness. The staging is again, then, suggestive; it does not make the mistake of trying to shoehorn the drama into a pointlessly narrow conception, let alone somehow attempt to make Don Giovanni ‘about’ the era in question.

 

There remains, however, one significant reservation. I do not know whose decision it was to serve up what seemed pretty much to be the Vienna version of the score, but I wish he or she had thought again; it made a change, though, from the unholy conflation of Vienna and Prague generally foisted upon us. To anyone who cares to think about it, Prague wins every time, although I have yet to attend a single performance in which Mozart’s dramatic sensibility is thus honoured. At any rate, we heard both of Donna Elvira’s arias, just the one of Don Ottavio’s (‘Dalla sua pace’), and the very rare Vienna duet for Zerlina and Leporello, ‘Per queste tue manine’. It was not, of course, uninteresting to hear the latter, for once, but it is almost unworthy of late Mozart, and holds up the action just as much as if we were to hear both of Ottavio’s arias (and/or, for that matter, both of Elvira’s: just as much a problem with Vienna). There was, at least, no messing about with the scena ultima – a relief, given the recent butchery perpetrated by the Royal Opera. It was a great pity, though, about the surtitles, whose translation was unworthy of Da Ponte’s matchless marriage of wit and profundity.

 

Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s Mahler I greatly admired in Vienna a year-and-a-half ago. At first, that is, in the Overture, I found him somewhat wanting in Mozart. I have learned to live with the opening being taken at an allegedly alla breve tempo far too fast to my ears; off the top of my head, only Barenboim and Muti, amongst living conductors, come close to what I hear in my head. More concerning were a general thinness of tone and apparent lack of concern with harmonic rhythm.  If those were not actually natural trumpets – I could not see the pit – they certainly sounded like them; others, of course, respond better to that rasping sound than I do. However, once past that disappointing opening, there was much to admire, though such tendencies were far from entirely banished. There will always be tempi with which one can quibble, but this was a variegated performance which did not harry the music, and which permitted both the on-stage drama to develop and the excellent London Philharmonic Orchestra to have its say. The Stone Guest Scene, however, was strangely un-climactic: partly, I think, a matter of the failure to use the Prague score, but it was more than that, for that failing is common to many other performances. Though beautifully played by the LPO and – for the most part – well sung, the final scene therefore did not jolt quite as it should.

 



Leporello (Edwin Crossley-Mercer) and Don Giovanni

Indeed, the main factor was probably the underpowered singing of  Taras Shtonda’s Commendatore. The other disappointment amongst the cast was Layla Claire’s vibrato-laden Donna Anna, whose musical line really needed to be clearer throughout.  Otherwise, a cast almost entirely unknown to me acquitted itself well, with a fine sense of company. Ben Johnson, whom I had heard before as Ottavio, albeit in English, sang exquisitely, almost to the extent of having one regret the lack of ‘Il mio tesoro’. Serena Farnocchia was a stylish Elvira, whilst Lenka Máčiková and Brandon Cedel offered vocally lively assumptions of the roles of Zerlina and Masetto. If Elliot Madore lacked the charisma of the great Giovannis, then he nevertheless delighted in the musico-dramatic quicksilver of the role, sufficiently differentiated from the equally lively Leporello of Edwin Crossley-Mercer. There was genuine chemistry between them. Perhaps ironically, given the ‘loss’ of his aria, it was only Johnson’s Ottavio which continued to ring in my ears; but this, like the production and performance as a whole, was a cast that proved considerably greater than the sum of its parts.

Don Giovanni, English National Opera, 17 October 2012

The Coliseum

Don Giovanni – Iain Paterson
Leporello – Darren Jeffery
Donna Anna – Katherine Broderick
Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson
Donna Elvira – Sarah Redgwick
Commendatore – Matthew Best
Zerlina – Sarah Tynan
Masetto – John Molloy

Rufus Norris (director)
Ian MacNeil (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Paul Andreson (lighting)
Jonathan Lunn (movement)
Finn Ross (projections)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

Zerlina (Sarah Tynan), Don Giovanni (Iain Paterson), Donna Elvira (Sarah Redgwick)
Images: Richard Hubert Smith

 

Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving pictures of condom packets – oddly chosen in so many ways, since few people find contraceptives especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an unlikely candidate to have employed  them – had attended the run-up to this revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni. In 2010, it registered as the worst staging I had ever seen: a fiercely contested category, when one considers that it includes Francesca Zambello’s mindless farrago across Covent Garden at the Royal Opera – now, may the Commendatore be thanked, consigned to the flames of Hell. (Kasper Holten, Director of Opera, is said to have insisted, having viewed it in horror, that the sets be destroyed, lest it never return.) There were grounds for the odd glimmer of hope; Norris was said to have revised the production in the face of its well-nigh universal mauling from critics and other audience members alike. Yet the marketing did little to allay one’s fears, especially when reading the bizarre description on ENO’s website of a ‘riveting romp [that] follows the last twenty-four hours in the life of the legendary Lothario’. Something really ought to be done about whomever is involved in publicising productions; for, irrespective of the quality of what we see on stage, they  more often than not end up sounding merely ludicrous: in this case, more Carry On Seville than one of the greatest musical dramas in the repertory. Even if one were willing thus to disparage Da Ponte – and I am certainly not – does Mozart’s re-telling of the Fall in any sense characterised by the phrase ‘riveting romp’?

How, then, had Norris’s revisions turned out? Early on, I felt there was a degree of improvement. The weird obsession with electricity – certainly not of the musical variety – had gone, but not to be replaced by anything else. Certain but only certain of the most bizarre impositions had gone, or been weeded out, yet not always thoroughly enough. For instance, there was a strange remnant of the already strange moment when, towards the end of the Act Two sextet, people began to strip off, when Don Ottavio – an ‘uptight fiancé’, according to the company website – carefully removed his shoes and socks. No one reacted, and a few minutes later – I think, during Donna Anna’a ‘Non mi dir’ – he put them back on again. Otherwise, the hideous sets and other designs remain as they were, though one might claim a degree of contemporary ‘relevance’ in that Don Giovanni’s dated ‘leisure wear’ now brings with it unfortunate resonances of the late Jimmy Savile. Alas, nothing is made of the similarity. The flat designed as if by a teenage girl, full of hearts and pink balloons, remains; as does the building that resembles a community centre. Leporello still appears to be a tramp. There are no discernible attempts to reflect Da Ponte’s, let alone Mozart’s, careful societal distinctions and there is no sign whatsoever that anyone has understood that Don Giovanni is a religious drama or it is nothing. Norris has clearly opted for ‘nothing’.

 

There is, believe it or not, a villain perhaps more pernicious still. Jeremy Sams’s dreadful, attention-seeking English translation does its best to live up to the ‘riveting romp’ description. A few, very loud, members of the audience did their best to disrupt what little ‘action’ there was by laughing uproariously after every single line: the very instance of a rhyme is intrinsically hilarious to some, it would seem. A catalogue of Sams’s sins – sin has gone by the board in the drama itself – would take far longer than Leporello’s aria. But I no more understand why the countries in that aria should be transformed into months – ‘ma in Ispagna’ becomes ‘March and April’ – than I do why Zerlina was singing about owning a pharmacy in ‘Vedrai carino,’ or whatever it became in this ‘version’. It is barely a translation, but nor is it any sense a reimagination along the brilliant lines of the recent gay Don Giovanni at Heaven; it merely caters towards those with no more elevated thoughts than Zerlina going down on her knees, about which we are informed time and time again, lest anyone should have missed such ‘humour’. The lack of respect accorded to Da Ponte borders upon the sickening.

Edward Gardner led a watered-down Harnoncourt-style performance. At first it might even have seemed exciting, but it soon became wearing, mistaking the aggressively loud for the dramatically potent. Where was the repose, let alone the well-nigh unbearable beauty, in Mozart’s score? A peculiar ‘version’ was employed, in that Elvira retained both her arias, whereas Ottavio only had his in the first act. On stage, Prague remains preferable every time, despite the painful musical losses its adoption entails; sadly, few conductors seem to bother.

Donna Anna (Katherine Broderick), Zerlina, Leporello (Darren Jeffery),
Masetto (John Molloy), Don Ottavio (Ben Johnson)

Iain Paterson remains bizarrely miscast in the title role, entirely bereft of charisma. Darren Jeffery’s Leporello was bluff and dull in tone. (How one longed for Erwin Schrott – in either role, or both!) Katherine Broderick was too often shrill and squally as Donna Anna, and her stage presence was less then convincing, shuffling on and off, without so much as a hint of seria imperiousness. Her ‘uptight fiancé’ was sung well enough, by Ben Johnson, though to my ears, his instrument is too much of an ‘English tenor’ to sound at home in Mozart.  Sarah Redgwick’s Elvira was probably the best of the bunch, perhaps alongside Matthew Best’s Commendatore, but anyone would have struggled in this production, with these words. Elvira more or less managed to seem a credible character, thanks to Redgwick’s impressive acting skills, quite an achievement in the circumstances. Sarah Tynan made little impression either way as Zerlina, though she had far more of a voice than the dry-, even feeble-toned Masetto of John Molloy: surely another instance of miscasting.

ENO had a viscerally exciting production, genuinely daring, almost worthy of Giovanni’s kinetic energy. It seems quite incomprehensible why anyone should have elected to ditch the coke-fuelled orgiastic extravagance of Calixto Bieito – now there is a properly Catholic sensibility – for Rufus Norris. whose lukewarm response at the curtain calls was more genuinely amusing than anything we had seen or heard on stage. Maybe the contraceptive imagery was judicious after all.

Don Giovanni: The Opera, RC Theatre Productions at Heaven, 23 April 2012



Don (Duncan Rock)
Images: Martin Cullum



 Don – Duncan Rock

 Leo – Zoë Bonner

 Eddie – Mark Cunningham

 Petra – Tamsin Daley

 Zac – Mark Dugdale

 Olivia – Stephanie Edwards
 Alan – Patrick Ashcroft
 Marina – Helen Winter
 Everyman – Damola Onadeko
 Club Hostess – Samantha Hull







Dominic Gray (director)
Cleo Pettit (designs)
Mia Flodquist (costumes)
Alex Cummins (lighting)
Samantha Hull (movement)

Colin Pettet (conductor)

Marina (Helen Winter), Zac (Mark Dugdale), and Don

The reader who has consulted the cast list may well wonder what was going on, though a good few of you will doubtless have heard already. This is ‘Don Giovanni: The Opera’ – as opposed to ‘Don Giovanni: The …’? – presented in the gay nightclub, Heaven, by RC Theatre Productions. With the exception of Don himself, a Soho club owner, each of the roles undergoes gender reversal. Leporello becomes Leo, Don’s PA. Elvira becomes an older, rather tiresome gay man, Eddie, deluded in his belief that he was ever ‘with’ Don in the first place, yet every bit as captivated as Elvira. Donna Anna becomes Alan, with Olivia (Don Ottavio) his fag hag accomplice; he has, as many of us suspect with Donna Anna in any case, consented quite willingly to Don’s advances, but wishes to pretend otherwise. Zerlina and Masetto become Zac and Marina, a working-class couple about to marry, but with one of them at least clearly interested in exploring the true nature of his sexual orientation. There are a couple of additional cast members, movement director Samantha Hull also appearing on stage (more on that below), and Damola Onadeko appearing in various guises, and with varying degrees of clothing, his muscular torso doubtless appealing alike to denizens of the on-stage club and to much of the audience. (The Wimpy Bar uniform is perhaps of more specialist interest.) His – Everyman’s – provision of cocaine added fuel to the kinetic energy of production and score, and reminded me in mind of one of the few persuasive stagings of Don Giovanni I have seen, that by Calixto Bieito for ENO.

Yes, it is cut, to two hours, including an interval. Yes, it is translated, or rather adapted, extremely well by Ranjit Bolt. (The Catalogue Aria transfers its attention, for instance, to Hampstead Heath, Clapham Common, the lavatories at Heaven, etc. …) Yes, we have a reduced orchestra (four violins, viola, cello, double bass, oboe, clarinet, bassoon), the reduction skilfully handled by Tony Burke and Ken Roberts for Pocket Productions. But it all works tremendously well. Colin Pettet’s musical direction is far more alert to the light and energy, to the contours and direction, of Mozart’s score than that one encounters in many major houses, likewise the performance of the orchestral players. (There is, incidentally, a club remix by Vince Clarke, formerly of Erasure and Depeche Mode, of the dance music in the final scene of the first act.) Yes, one loses much, though perhaps not nearly so much as one might expect, by the transposition of voices, not least in terms of the Commendatore becoming Petra (though the choice of name brings a smile to the face!) And yes, I admit that the quality of the singing varied on the night I attended. However, despite suffering from a cold, Zoë Bonner made a captivating Leo, the transposition – in character terms – utterly convincing. And in Duncan Rock as Don we saw and heard, I think, a true potential star of the future. His onstage charisma matches the deep, virile quality of his voice, and his well-honed physique certainly did no harm in this production. One had no difficulty whatsoever imagining this Don seducing anyone who caught his eye. (Rock will appear as Papageno at ENO next season; having already sung Don Giovanni for the Welsh National Opera, his career is clearly, rightly, in the ascendant.)

Don and Petra (Tamsin Dalley)

Don Giovanni is notoriously a graveyard for directors. I shall not list here the number of catastrophic failures I have witnessed, though two efforts by London’s major houses this season might provide context, both quite incoherent, those by Francesco Zambello for Covent Garden, and Rufus Norris for ENO. Zambello’s appeared not even to have attempted to consider the work, whilst Norris’s at best required a great deal of reconsideration. It is more or less impossible to choose between them. This setting of 1980s hedonism, liberation, and crucially, repression, by contrast seemed ideal for the work, director Dominic Gray’s larger conception and attention to detail always commendable, and at their best illuminating indeed. (And I speak as someone extremely fussy when it comes to Mozart!)

Take the final scene’s presentation of a properly Foucauldian sense of the social construction of madness or indeed disease more generally. (Hell for modernity?) Is a straitjacketed Don insane, stricken by HIV/AIDS, perhaps both? He is certainly held captive by the Hobbesian ideology of Thatcherism. (Those who relate the latter to Locke have more often than not missed the point, or at least part of the point; the strength of the state, the mysterious ‘authorities’ to which Don Ottavio in Da Ponte’s original refers, is crucial to the entire project.) As was recognised by the notorious Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, rendering illegal 'promotion' of homosexuality by local authorities, supported by Michael Howard, a subsequent leader of the Conservative Party, the shop-soiled ideological remnants of Victorian Manchester liberalism needed buttressing by the poujadisme of the right-wing press. (Remember ‘Essex Man’? Was he obliquely deconstructed in the portrayal of Zac?) Libertarianism was never an especially Thatcherite characteristic. Some reviews declared the presence of Margaret Thatcher – I rather relished her obvious doubling in the person of Samantha Hull as a Club Hostess! – a mistake, but in the context of a 1980s treatment of homosexuality and societal oppression more generally, it did not seem entirely unreasonable. I am not sure that an appearance by Dame Jill Knight, Chairman – Conservative women of that ilk preferred the masculine title – of something called the ‘Child and Family Protection Group’ would have garnered much, or indeed, any recognition. More importantly, anyway, we were reminded of how issues of libertinism have, in modern times since the contemporaneous writings of the Marquis de Sade, always proved an abidingly political issue, whatever the attempts to reduce them to ‘morality,’ always closely related to the concerns of Mozart and Da Ponte.

Don and Zac

Another great strength of the production, in contrast to so many, is its appreciation of societal distinctions. They may not be quite so subtle as those Mozart and Da Ponte craft, and of course they are different: in 1787, a society of orders stood close to revolutionary upheaval, whereas in 1987, class, despite Conservative claims, remained very much an operative concept. The attraction Zac feels towards Don is above all sexual, of course, but that is reinforced, and indeed partly a product, of the glaring contrast between Don’s riches and Zac’s poverty: the night before his wedding, he can only take Marina to a Wimpy Bar (evocatively designed by Cleo Pettit). For all the virtues of its whirlwind drama, even Bieito’s production fell seriously short in ignoring Don Giovanni’s nobility.

There are plans to tour this production following its London run. It comes highly recommended; catch it if you can. Vivà la libertà!

Some thoughts on Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

(Originally published in the Royal Opera's programme booklet for Don Giovanni.)



Lorenzo Da Ponte

Stung by a review of Don Giovanni, which extolled Mozart’s music without so much as mentioning his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte cautioned: ‘A poet deserves to be esteemed no less because he labours on a well-known theme’. Poets from antiquity onwards would doubtless nod assent: what often proves of interest is divergence from previous retellings, the Orpheus myth our archetype, rather than inventing an ‘original’ tale. Quality is the thing, Romantic infatuation with originality notwithstanding. Yet librettists do not furnish completed works; ideally, they proffer a springboard for music, even when composer and librettist are one and the same. (That Wagner composed some of Tristan’s music before completing his poem says nothing about æsthetic priority.) Mozart’s libretti were always provisional in nature, pending various musical decisions. He was not unusual in that: consider the richly documented collaboration between Strauss and Hofmannsthal, wherein we read Strauss on Der Rosenkavalier’s opening scene: ‘delightful: it will set itself to music like oil and melted butter … You are Da Ponte and [Eugène] Scribe rolled into one.’ Now we certainly do not perform operas we consider only to boast good libretti, such as those Da Ponte wrote for Salieri and others, yet we speak of ‘Mozart’s Da Ponte operas’ as a particular – and particularly successful – trilogy. For, even if occasional difficulties inevitably arose, Mozart’s working relationship with Da Ponte proved easier and its results more unambiguously triumphant than the composer’s collaborations with other librettists. We have only to glance at earlier treatments of the stories in question to appreciate both men’s contribution. Without elevating Da Ponte over Molière and Beaumarchais, we appreciate that Da Ponte knew or would heed a composer’s requirements, including what should be left open.

Sena Jurinac as Donna Elvira (left) and Donna Anna (right)

For instance, the Romantic claim that Donna Anna desires Don Giovanni has received puritanical criticism, apparently deaf to erotic truths voiced in Mozart’s score. Even from an ultra-literalist reading of the libretto, it is by no means certain that Anna has not been seduced by Giovanni, nor that she has not in some sense sought seduction – and him. Da Ponte’s openness or ambiguity has enabled Mozart’s, or at least the audience’s, further development. Anna can hardly be said to burn with desire for Don Ottavio, though she certainly burns with vengeance and thus with feelings towards her father and Giovanni. The most unambiguously seria and therefore superficially ‘eighteenth-century’ character thus also looks forward towards the tragic conflicts of nineteenth-century opera and drama, Schiller as much as Wagner, just as Idomeneo had harked back to French tragédie lyrique (Gluck, even Rameau) and forward to Don Giovanni. (It did not benefit from a librettist such as Da Ponte though, long remaining ‘problematical.) Nineteenth-century musical drama is not straightforwardly born in opera buffa; it is at least as much a product of dramma giocoso, in which the whole world, socially, politically, sexually, æsthetically, metaphysically, becomes a stage.


In the absence of documentary evidence, we may argue ad nauseam about Da Ponte’s precise intention in calling Don Giovanni a dramma giocoso. However, although Carlo Goldoni neither invented the term nor employed it consistently, it retains the connotation of his operatic reforms, combining parti serie, noble characters from the world of serious opera, with parti buffi from comic opera – servants, peasants, etc. – with music set accordingly. Goldoni also often creates characters lying somewhere in between: di mezzo carattere. Whether or no Da Ponte intended something qualitatively different from Le nozze di Figaro by employing the term ‘dramma giocoso’, and whether Mozart deliberately used another (unlikely), Don Giovanni develops Goldoni’s tradition, not least by introducing ensembles in which serious and comic roles combine – and compete, just as in emergent bourgeois society.

Cesare Siepi as Don Giovanni

The mezzo carattere Giovanni is a nobleman, of course; however, his essence is instability, transforming all around him. It is no coincidence that noblemen would soon stand at the forefront of revolution in France, sans culottes operatically brought onstage by social ‘superiors’. We may note here the wish of Giovanni’s creator, Luigi Bassi, for a full-length aria, the sort of request to which Mozart was generally happy to respond (as in the additional ‘Mi tradì’, for Vienna’s Elvira). With Giovanni, however, avoidance of social typecasting is maintained by denial, upon which neither composer nor librettist seems to have wavered, of such a definitive portrayal. There may have been revolutionary trouble ahead for Almaviva, but the societal dissolution threatened by his licentious successor – ‘Viva la libertà!’ – is quite different: he dances on an existential volcano. Note Mozart’s quite startling emphasis upon Da Ponte’s words: trumpets, kettledrums, martial rhythms, and manifold repetition. The words might have passed for nothing in another setting, yet they had to be there in the first place. Exchange of clothes in the second act may primarily be a comic device, but also dramatises social and sexual tension – and transgression. Giovanni, notably, relishes the role-play more than Leporello.

Moreover, and this is Da Ponte’s doing, Giovanni is the only character to connect the other members of a small principal cast. He is socially cohesive, connecting noble Anna and peasant Masetto, and socially corrosive, undermining those orders or estates upon which such different social and musical characters rest. Elvira comes closest otherwise, but her (gendered) concerns relate entirely to her own feelings: she has no connection with the Commendatore. (That said, Da Ponte, let alone Mozart, renders the female characters far more sympathetic than his librettist predecessor, Giovanni Bertati. Likewise, it is Da Ponte’s masterstroke, of which Mozart takes full advantage, to keep the Countess, Figaro’s trump card, up his dramatic sleeve to open the second act.) The celebrated metrical combination and dislocation of socially-defined dances in the first-act finale – aristocratic minuet, middling contredanse, and plebeian Teitsch – are Mozart’s own, whirling eighteenth-century society to the very edge of the abyss, yet they extend rather than contradict Da Ponte’s libretto.

Max Slevogt, The Champagne Aria (1902)

That near-Faustian heroism which is the opera’s most telling legacy to the nineteenth century is most overwhelmingly expressed in Mozart’s music – Nietzsche berated Wagner for allegedly believing that all music must follow the Stone Guest Scene – yet again, Da Ponte is supportive. Tirso de Molina’s ‘original’ Juan, always intends to be pardoned through confession, though his cynicism will not be rewarded, his catchphrase, ‘Tan largo me lo fiáis’ (‘You give me such long credit’), proving in no sense heroic. Molière’s Juan is an atheist whose hypocrisy becomes increasingly marked. The atheist heroism of Da Ponte’s Giovanni intensifies. All three dramas nevertheless possess a fundamental religious element, which other re-tellings, not least the commedia dell’arte, had relegated to supernatural colour. The content-less – in more sense than one – kinetic energy of Giovanni himself, carelessly fizzing away in the ‘Champagne Aria’, is founded upon the libretto’s presentation avant la lettre of Goethe’s negating Mephistopheles. It finds fulfilment in our hero’s definitive self-opposition to the Commendatore’s tragic voice of orthodoxy. A-theism is defined by absence, negation.

Luigi Bassi as the first Don Giovanni

By contrast, Leporello, superstitious though probably in everyday practical terms a cheerful agnostic, cannot achieve his master’s atheist heroism. Leporello’s buffo interjections remain just that: interjections into a drama transformed verbally and musically, the dotted, neo-Baroque rhythms of both strings and Giovanni’s vocal line conveying otherworldly gravity. Mozart, as he would in his Requiem, pours proto-Wagnerian chromatic wine into Handelian bottles, less creating a mismatch – for the languages are not so very far apart – than permitting slight disjuncture so as to suggest new metaphysical vistas. Archaic trombones reach back further in musical history to recall not only the equali of Habsburg state funerals, not only Handel’s Saul and Israel in Egypt, but above all their ancient association with death and the supernatural. Mozart had employed three trombones in his early Waisenhausmesse, KV 139, its ‘Crucifixus’ an extraordinary premonition of the Day of Judgement. Here, however, such intimations attain final consummation. Christ’s Passion is relived and transformed through a Fall prefiguring Tristan in atheistic defiance, the more telling granted the Roman Catholicism of Mozart and the Abbé Da Ponte.

For we should understand Mozart’s operas better if we attended more closely to his sacred music, Stravinsky’s ‘Rococo sweets of sin’. Da Ponte certainly renders the peasant couple, Biagio/Masetto and Maturina/Zerlina more rounded characters than in the earlier Bertati-Giuseppe Gazzaniga opera. Crucially, however, Da Ponte introduces their loving reconciliation (‘Vedrai, carino’), fully exploited by a composer peerless in expressing the miracle of forgiveness. Its locus classicus lies in Figaro, the Countess’s radiant benediction vouchsafing not only human but divine grace, Da Ponte’s direction that the Count kneel before her when seeking forgiveness having set the theological scene. Man’s sinful nature is not denied, for we do not believe that the Count will remain faithful; nor, despite Da Ponte’s necessary excision of Beaumarchais’s most provocative political challenges, do we believe that the feudal society upon which Almaviva’s power rests will remain standing. Yet that ambivalently redemptive precedent renders all the more devastating Così’s non-redemptive non-resolution: further Mephistophelian negation in an unspeakably cruel ‘school for lovers’. Mozart’s most sweetly seductive sado-masochism, ravishing horns of cuckoldry (Fiordiligi’s ‘Per pieta, ben mio’) lingering long in the mind’s ear, lays bare the cruellest truths of the catastrophic delusion we name romantic love. It proceeds furthest beyond the ‘merely’ cynical libretto, which has nevertheless acted as springboard: added to, subverted, deepened. If Don Giovanni’s closing moral is not quite sung through its successor’s clenched teeth, it attains in its after-shock an almost Brechtian alienation, Giovanni’s challenge unforgotten. Further disruption and dislocation are deferred, but that is all. In all three operas, we travel pre-emptively beyond Wagner: further each time, redemption and transcendence first undercut and eventually unattainable. For Da Ponte and Mozart, there can be no Liebestod.