Opera North’s
Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Production notes
Synopsis Act 1 Leporello is waiting for his master, Don Giovanni, who is inside the house of the Commendatore, intent on seducing his daughter, Donna Anna. There are sounds of a struggle; Donna Anna and a masked Don Giovanni appear. The Commendatore is woken by the commotion and is killed as he fights with Don Giovanni. The murderer escapes. Anna and her betrothed, Don Ottavio, swear to avenge her father’s death. Giovanni encounters Donna Elvira, whom he has previously seduced and promised to marry. She has travelled far in pursuit of him. Giovanni slips away, leaving Leporello behind to recount his master’s sexual exploits. Giovanni comes across a group of villagers celebrating the wedding of Zerlina and Masetto. Taking an immediate fancy to the bride, Giovanni orders Leporello to get the groom and his guests safely out of the way by taking them to his house to be entertained. Giovanni is making good progress with Zerlina when Elvira interrupts him. She persuades the girl not to succumb.
Photographer: Robert Workman
Anna and Ottavio encounter Giovanni but fail to recognize him. He tries to convince them that Elvira, who has returned to denounce him, is insane. |2
As he leaves, Anna realizes the identity of her assailant and her father’s murderer. Giovanni is still determined to seduce Zerlina, and orders big celebrations at his house. During the festivities, three masked guests appear: Ottavio, Anna and Elvira, who have come to confront their enemy. As the guests dance, Giovanni whirls Zerlina away. Her cries for help are heard from outside the room. The three maskers reveal themselves and publicly denounce Don Giovanni.
Act 2 Fed up with the life he is forced to lead, Leporello is about to quit Don Giovanni’s service; but a bribe persuades him to stay. Giovanni has set his sights on Donna Elvira’s maid and, to assist his intentions, he makes Leporello swap clothes with him. When Elvira herself appears at her window, he uses the disguised Leporello as a decoy to lure her away. Giovanni’s serenade is interrupted by Masetto, who is out seeking his blood. Pretending to be Leporello, he beats him up. The battered Masetto is comforted by Zerlina. Leporello is trying to lose Elvira in the darkened
streets. Mistaken by everyone for Giovanni, Leporello confesses to the deception, to the stunned amazement of all. A wretched Elvira is forced to admit to herself that she still loves Giovanni, despite his misdeeds. Giovanni and Leporello meet in a graveyard where the Commendatore is buried. They are interrupted by the sound of the dead man’s voice. Defiantly, Giovanni asks the statue of the Commendatore to come dine with him. The statue accepts. Ottavio tries to persuade Anna to marry him soon, but she is unable to return his love while she is still in mourning for her murdered father. Giovanni is having supper when Elvira arrives, begging him to repent. He rejects her entreaties and she storms out. She is heard to scream, and Leporello goes to investigate. He sees the statue of Commendatore, who has accepted Giovanni’s invitation to dinner. The Commendatore tells his host that his time on earth is almost up and urges him to repent. Giovanni refuses, and the Commendatore leaves him to face his damnation. It is left for a terrified Leporello to tell the others what has occurred. Photographer: Robert Workman
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Director’s Concept Alongside our production of Don Giovanni Digital Theatre is delighted to present a set of production notes, taking you through the concept behind Opera North’s great stage production. We speak to Alessandro Talevi, director of Don Giovanni about his interpretation of one of the opera’s heavyweights: “In this era when directors are expected to have a ‘take’ or a concept for any work they lay their hands on, Don Giovanni seems to elude categorisation and resists being shoe-horned into any one interpretation. Productions are often controversial, simply because people’s expectations of what the piece should ‘be’ are so varied. Why is this? It could be a question of the innate ‘tone’ and structure of the work. It can be literally described as the chaotic last day in the life of an arch-seducer. The opera begins with a murder, proceeds to a series of rambling sex-driven escapades more or less comic in nature, and ends with the punishment of the original crime, with the Don being pulled down to hell by the stone statue of his murder victim. Is the piece as whole then, comic or serious? Certainly, the outer scenes exude a dark terror which negates the possibility of them being played in a light-hearted way, despite the innately comic idea of a statue coming to dinner. The inner scenes however, often seem to buckle under the weight of a serious or portentous interpretation, creating the overall impression of a very long three hours in the theatre. We all end up looking forward to that damnation scene, for the wrong reasons. Photographer: Robert Workman
There are several other vexing issues that a director has to face... |4
Photographer: Robbie Jack
Timing Da Ponte the librettist may have stuck formally to the classical unities of ‘time’, ‘place’ and ‘action’, but they are stretched often beyond breakingpoint. Setting the scene within a single day might add a fast-moving dynamic to the story-telling, but there are several ‘holes’ which simply can’t be glossed over if you are going take the realistic approach. If the Commendatore is killed at the outset, how on earth is his tomb (with inscription) erected in the graveyard less than a day later? And how does
Donna Elvira manage to reappear with such frequency to thwart Giovanni’s escapades? We have literally a few minutes of ‘real time’ between one such episode and another, yet she even manages to fit in an off-stage flying visit to the Don’s residence with the newly-rescued Zerlina where - according to Leporello later on - she badmouths the Don to his waiting party guests and gets locked out of the house. In the average running time of any performance she would have had no more than 45 seconds to do this between her ‘rescue’ aria and her next appearance in the quartet. |5
Photographer: Robert Workman
Disguise Then there is the question of the various disguises which start cropping up in Act 2. The suspension of disbelief is stretched to its limits in the scenes where Elvira falls for Leporello dressed in the Don’s hat and coat, and when Masetto and his mates are duped by the Don who is pretending to be Leporello. These might have been acceptable for audiences two hundred years ago, but for modern audiences they are almost ridiculous, and are very often the weakest point of the narrative journey in ‘realistic’ productions. Perhaps most troublesome of all is the mystery of the character who is at the piece’s heart and the strange sense of arrested emotional development that the characters around him seems to exude. Despite his superhuman
energy and charisma, we know little about who the Don actually is. Certainly the music that he gets to sing doesn’t give anything away - his arias are devoid of any self-reflective qualities and are concerned only with hedonistic goals - seduction, deception, celebration. Paradoxically perhaps, for such an innately compelling figure, his music is monochromatic, onedimensional, characterless. The others, by contrast, have been lavished with some of the most beautiful music Mozart ever wrote, and yet their characters are strangely inert. There is no sense of character development. Anna and Ottavio are left repeating the same things in their final scene that they expressed to each other at the beginning of the opera. Elvira and Leporello, who both nurture a different |6
type of love-hate relationship with Giovanni, are throughout the opera unable to break free from his spell, despite their oft-expressed desire to do so. It is only perhaps Zerlina and Masetto who may have a found deeper understanding of each other after coming into contact with the Don. The others are living in a sort of pause-button purgatory, seduced and blinded by the intense flame of Giovanni’s energy. Critics who deride the post-damnation scene as being anti-climactic are missing the point: the sense of emptiness is an important first phase for six characters who are contemplating the meaning of their lives post-Giovanni.
The Don The starting point for our production was exactly this: the almost superhuman magnetism of the Don’s personality and his mythical nature, which seems to distort or render superfluous the naturalistic surroundings in which he finds himself. His character works best when it is left undisturbed by dramaturgical explanations of who he is or why he behaves as he does. He is a universal cipher for the uninhibited libido, who could appear in any period, in any place, in any century. His escapades therefore, rather than being confined to the various dark alleyways of one particular city, take place over a number of centuries: he is a time-travelling Don. He can slip in and out of any era at will. The periods I have chosen reflect the essence of the characters who interact with Don Giovanni, and their relationships with their loved ones. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio seem naturally to be associated with a buttoned-up late Victorian moral code, while Zerlina and Masetto inhabit the 1950’s, with their more uninhibited manner yet with a lingering respect for the upper classes. Photographer: Robert Workman
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Elvira is a special case: the nature of her many surprise appearances and the avidity with which she thwarts each one of Don Giovanni’s attempted seductions make her a sort of mythical counterbalance to the Don. In every case, she seems to ‘rewind’ his progress. I have her in this production chasing him through the centuries as the archetypal scorned woman - beginning with her first appearance as a rather over-wrought denizen of early 1980’s punk, through the periods of Don Giovanni’s seductions of Anna and Zerlina, to the supper scene which is played out in a contemporary setting.
The Don himself morphs subtly from one period into the next. With Leporello at his side, he is the driving force in a travelling music-hall act, with each escapade a sort of show taking place within a single claustrophobic box set, a metaphysical puppet theatre which is the timeless arena for each of the Don’s conquests. He is all-powerful within it. His hapless victims are toyed with like puppets. We must not forget that the most ancient version of the Don Juan legend was told on the streets in puppet theatresand certainly the bawdier, more slapstick elements of Mozart’s opera have much in common with this type of street theatre.
Leporello, his long suffering companion, is a seedy end-of-the-pier entertainer in the Punch and Judy tradition. The iconography of his costume is a timeless one and means the same things to people in the 19th century, the 1950’s and indeed the modern era.
The essential quality of street theatre is its ability to convey a serious message using comic and light-hearted means, and it is precisely this quality which I believe is the essence of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni.”
Photographer: Robert Workman
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