Set design by Jan Verswejveld for the new Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by the Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove, as it looked at the Opéra National de Paris in 2019 (photo by Charles Duprat via Scenography Today).
I saw it at the Met last week, an opera I feel I really know but hadn’t in fact seen in quite a long time—there was a time in the 2000s when I was literally boycotting Mozart operas at the Met because of conductor James Levine, who had a tendency to give them a kind of Wagnerian orchestral sound, with fat lush strings and over-slow, majestic tempos, which I loved when he was conducting Wagner but is seriously at odds with the way people should listen to Mozart nowadays, in the style developed by the early music movement, out of respect for the way it sounded when Mozart was alive, requiring a much smaller orchestra (fewer than 40 players most of the time), in which you hear all the individual voices distinctly and a constant nervous tension among them, a complex of differences rather than a single compound sound (this conductor, Nathalie Stutzmann, one of a startling but welcome profusion of women conductors in this season, brought that unusually well in my opinion, along with some options I’d never heard of, such as the way the “dry” recitative, the dialogue sections in which most of the plot happens, normally accompanied by a single harpsichord, came instead with its own band, of fortepiano (the proto-piano that had replaced the harpsichord by the time Mozart grew up), cello, and theorbo (an enormous bass lute), or the shocking freedom of the tempo, starting in the overture.
The staging is another matter, the set almost literally black and white—a clump of three stone houses in a vaguely Mediterranean style, at odd angles to each other, in indeterminate dark colors between gray and brownish, with arched balconies reachable by outdoor staircases, and the lights, when they turn them on, are stark white. The action, too, has become black and white, stripping away the plot ambiguities that have given the work such powers of fascination in its lifetime.
For instance, the text of the opera as written in 1787 opens with Don Giovanni’s clownish manservant, Leporello, standing in front of a house (Donna Anna’s) grousing about the servant’s lot, waiting outdoors while his gentleman is “inside with the beauty”—a noise interrupts him, and Giovanni and Anna rush out, she clutching his arm and crying out, “You won’t escape, unless you kill me!” and he replying, “Madwoman, you won’t find out who I am!” We have no idea how long they’ve been in there, and we never really learn what they’ve been doing, or who might be guilty of what (it’s likely, according to some theories, that he was in disguise as her lover or fiancé, as happens twice in the first Don Juan play, by Tirso de Molina, of which she couldn’t publicly accuse him without revealing that she would welcome a night visit from the right man and setting it up so that she would be the one accused of loose morals).
But van Hove has added something at the end of the overture: Giovanni and Leporello enter together, and Giovanni takes the stairs into the darkened house before Leporello starts singing his aria. When he comes out again with Anna after him, it’s only a couple of minutes later, and it’s clear at least that whatever has happened must have been brutally sudden.
Next, Anna is calling to her servants for help, but (according to the libretto) hears the voice of her father the Commendatore, and runs back into the house, so that when the Commendatore arrives he finds only Giovanni; but he immediately draws his sword and demands a fight. Giovanni resists, but finally defends himself (“All right, you wretch, if you want to die”), and quickly strikes the old man to the ground, where he dies while Giovanni and Leporello look on, and the three low voices express their shock in spooky counterpoint, as the soul departs the body. At the Met, however, everybody’s dressed like a character in a 1950s Italian movie, Giovanni and the other upper-class men in dark suits with blazing white shirts and skinny black ties, and there are no swords; instead of dueling, Giovanni calmly pulls a pistol out of his pocket and shoots the Commendatore in the chest, leaving the singing somewhat disembodied.
A lot of the characters are portrayed as ready to point pistols at each other, but only Giovanni fires one. Almost all the characters are also constantly ready for sex—that’s in the libretto, I think. Donna Elvira, a woman Giovanni married and then abandoned after three days, wants him back, and is just about ready to do it on the spot with Leporello, when he’s thinly “disguised” as his boss (wearing Giovanni’s overcoat and tie). Zerlina and Masetto, a peasant couple on the point of getting married, are near going at it underneath her skirt in front of all their friends when she catches Giovanni’s eye. Don Ottavio, Anna’s fiancé, crumples to the floor in frustration when she tells him he must wait while she mourns her father. But Giovanni is so much more systematic about it; in his first attempt on Zerlina, he skillfully takes off her dress, leaving her in a slip, as they sing their duet. Even though the music is ravishing, there and in the serenade with mandolin he sings in the hope of seducing Donna Elvira’s maid, his body seems cold, preoccupied with the next step. Other characters rush around ready to beat somebody up (usually Leporello); when Giovanni beats up Masetto in the second act, punishing him for getting in his way with Zerlina, he works him over like a professional, crushing him without expending any extra energy.
This is not the Don Giovanni of the Romantics who adopted the work as a totem, damned but charismatic, like Milton’s Satan or Byron’s corsair Conrad:
He knew himself a villain—but he deem'd
The rest no better than the thing he seem'd;
And scorn'd the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
He knew himself detested, but he knew
The hearts that loath'd him, crouch'd and dreaded too.
Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt
This guy is a simple rapist, murderer, and upper-class thug. Although (I should say) it also seemed to work that way, with some exceptions, as music theater—it wasn’t less exciting than a conventional staging. It wasn’t completely humorless. It wasn’t unsexy. It was just very different.
***
Another thing that had changed while I wasn’t watching Don Giovanni was a very large cultural thing, a new phase in the way we tend to regard the Don Juan syndrome, as the condition of wealthy or powerful men who seem to have a deep-seated need to build up an extremely large list of women sexual partners, since the legal cases of Harvey Weinstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein, and you fill in the rest according to your own personal and political predilections. We no longer find it possible to tolerate these men in our midst, hopefully for worthy reasons, because we can’t accept the concomitant dehumanization of women as objects to be collected, as Don Giovanni collects them, keeping a tally of his conquests as if he were in a competition of some kind (as Leporello says, “in Italy 640, in Germany 231, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, but but but in Spain—but in Spain, it’s already 1,003!”).
But the myth isn’t exactly about that guy: Don Juan Tenorio, the indefatigable Andalusian seducer of women in Spanish myth, in a story that evolved from folk to literature, from puppet show and improvisational comedy through to the “higher” genres, and from Spain to Italy, Austria, and Germany and England, is an aristocrat, to be sure (hence the “Don”), and a bad guy with a dreadful punishment at the end (dragged into Hell by the statue of the murdered Commendatore after he recklessly and blasphemously invites it to supper), but he’s normally imagined as young and handsome, seductive, often tender, pursuing his women by legitimate-looking means (he gets them into bed with promises of marriage).
By the time he arrives in the high culture, he’s the protagonist in a comedy, not a tragedy, in spite of the gruesome finish, exchanging witty barbs and philosophical ideas with the backtalking valet and carrying out his intrigues in farcical disguises, and he’s a rebel, an open atheist and flaunter of conventional morality. Molière got into political trouble for his prose comedy version (Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, 1665), for making him too attractive (the government of Louis XIV shut it down after 15 performances, demanded severe changes, and censored its first printed edition with strips of paper glued over the offensive bits).
Mozart’s librettist for the 1787 opera was Lorenzo da Ponte, Jewish-born (his father had the whole family converted when he wanted to take a Catholic girl as a second wife) and a somewhat renegade priest (he’d been fired from a teaching job at a seminary in Treviso for defending the ideas of Rousseau), a friend of the famous adventurer Giacomo Casanova, with a similar reputation for womanizing in his own right, who had fled legal troubles in Venice and succeeded in getting named “poeta cesareo” or official court poet/librettist in Vienna for the Enlightenment emperor Joseph II.
Like Mozart, Da Ponte was a Freemason (maybe not as serious about it as Mozart), member of a powerfully progressive movement in those days (French lodges had welcomed Franklin and Jefferson as members and played a big role in getting the American Revolution financed by the French government). He reworked the rebelliousness of the character in terms more political than religious, following the mood of his 1786 Nozze di Figaro, filling his text with class confrontations among gentry, servants, and peasantry, peaking in the first act finale, when Giovanni is hosting a party for Masetto and Zerlina (hoping to get the bride alone while the bridegroom is dancing); it’s interrupted by the aristocratic Anna, Ottavio, and Elvira disguised in Venetian-style masks, and Mozart has composed a fantastically complex dance music for the moment, in which minuet, contredanse, and triple-meter “German dance”, with their different rhythms and tempos, are performed simultaneously (if you’re interested I found a vivid online video analysis)—and Giovanni welcomes the intruders by making them join in a Masonically rousing “Viva la libertà!”
Mozart’s operas were pretty much the first, I think, to get taken up as items in a standard repertory of “classics” and “greats” that kept getting performed for years and centuries after they were composed, and developing elaborate performance traditions in different countries. Don Giovanni was probably the most important item in this process, because the music anticipates Romanticism so strongly, bringing on the ecstatic reception of Romantic writers like E.T.A. Hofmann and Søren Kierkegaard, turning Don Juan, as Goethe’s poem (and Berlioz’s and Liszt’s musical experiments) did with that other puppet-show figure Dr. Faust, into a kind of Byronic hero, cursed but deeply charismatic (Byron’s own take on Don Juan was characteristically contrarian; Juan, rhymes with “true-one”, in Byron’s unfinished comic epic, is never the seducer, almost always the seduced, a concept taken up by George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman, 1903). I think that’s the Giovanni that remained with us through the end of the 20th century, most represented in his last scene, by his heroic resistance to compromise, as the statue grasps him by the hand and demands repentance, and he howls with pain but refuses to be untrue to himself, and the composer has deployed the trombones.
That Don Giovanni is just not available any more, in the age of Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani. You can’t transform him into metaphysics the way the German poet Nikolaus Lenau did in the 1840s (inspiring the composer Richard Strauss with his own exuberant Don Juan). You can’t stop thinking about what he’s doing to the women, and you shouldn’t! But by the same token he can no longer be seen as a rebel against the patriarchy—he embodies the patriarchy himself. It’s hard to see how we could get him back, or why we’d want to, other than the obvious thing, that it’s so clearly the best opera ever written.
What can you do about it? Can you quietly bypass it, as with the anti-Semitism in Bach’s St. John Passion (the music does all the work and you don’t have to think about the words)? Can you actively confront it, as the Wagner family has done in Bayreuth with the anti-Semitism of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (they just interrupted the performance, toward the end of the last act, and gave the audience a valuable lecture)? Can you keep on totally ignoring it, as we generally do with the Orientalism and misogyny of Puccini’s Turandot and Madama Butterfly?
***
Which brings us back to Ivo van Hove and the Met, where they absolutely made a decision, to acknowledge Don Giovanni as a completely bad guy, and run with that. And it works, as I was saying, but that’s especially because of a miracle they pull at the end (spoiler coming, but spoilers don’t matter in opera).
There’s no statue of the Commendatore in this version, no Stoned Guest as Professor Peter Schickele called him (though of course if you know the words they’re still singing about one), just a kind of memorial object left on the site where he died, at the front of the stage near the prompter’s box, what looks from the balcony like a single rose in a glass, and the person to whom Giovanni extends his supper invitation is a ghost in a blood-stained white shirt. Over supper, he’s having some kind of manic episode, torturing Leporello by denying him food and catching him when he steals it (in the libretto), then throwing fruit around and knocking the table over (not in the libretto). Elvira comes in to implore him one last time to change his ways, and he sends her away, but she sees the ghost-statue and comes back screaming. Then the ghost-statue enters (normally the singer isn’t visible and his voice is amplified, and in this case I thought it sounded as if he might be wearing a mic, to get that particular inside-a-statue reverb) and offers his return invitation (“Now come and have dinner with me”) and commands him to repent and as Giovanni refuses, Hell, instead of opening up in the floor, reveals itself as where they already are: for the first time in the evening, the set moves, the houses swing apart and turn around to show an enormous box of what I thought from the balcony was flames (but turns out to have been “grainy footage of hundreds of naked bodies writhing in mud, perhaps of the boiling variety” according to Alex Ross in The New Yorker) behind the overturned dinner table.
Then, when the music is ready, it closes back over him and the houses return, but changed: the balconies and windows are filled with the colors that have been missing all night, mostly from flowers, but I thought the first thing I saw was a clothesline hung with brightly colored clothes, as the surviving characters sing their sextet, on the return of normal life and vision of a future (Donna Anna still isn’t ready to get married), and judgment of the dead man (“That’s how you end up if you do evil”, in a fugal treatment, as three abuse victims, four counting Leporello, get the last word). The color alone is a stunning effect; it cancels everything that was wrong. Suddenly the opera isn’t even about Don Giovanni—it’s about us, living in a plague of psychopaths who seem to have have eaten all the beauty out of our lives, and the promise that they’ll die in terror and humanity will survive.
Maybe someday we’ll even get something like the old Don Giovanni back. But for now, it looks like this is the one we need.
A tour de force. Thank you.