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.
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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...
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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.
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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
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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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