Maybe you’re like me, and you need a spoiler warning for an opera that premiered in 1787, the same year the U.S. Constitution was written.
If so, you can stop reading now and return to the Editor’s Note next week.
I had never seen Don Giovanni — one of Mozart’s masterworks — before attending a performance at Santa Fe Opera last week, and I was pleasantly surprised at the way the opera subverted many ancient tropes of the genre.
Yes, there’s an innocent person who gets killed very early in the opera. But then, for the remainder of the production, you’re actually watching Cosmic Justice play out for the antagonist. Much like in The Marriage of Figaro — penned in 1786, one year before Don Giovanni — Mozart finds a way for the common man to triumph over a wealthy sociopath. The title character’s worldview is telegraphed immediately in the Santa Fe Opera production, which depicts his home as a base monument to ego. Here, arranged on the wall, are countless iterations of the same portrait of the red-clad nobleman.
The set changes several times, and the scenic design by Yannis Thavoris requires cast members to push the walls apart and to spin them into different orientations. Sometimes the walls close in on each other, and sometimes they open to reveal another room.
Don Giovanni, perhaps better known to the audience in concept as Don Juan, is a “ladies’ man” who isn’t interested in showing his conquests a good time. He’s in it for the numbers, as famously conveyed to the audience by his valet, Leporello, who catalogues the women Don Giovanni has seduced at home and abroad. Don Giovanni tells Leporello he plans on adding several more names in one night. In today’s world — and also in Mozart’s — that wouldn’t mark him as a ladies’ man; it would paint him as someone incapable of pleasing the women he hopes to seduce.
Don Giovanni is expertly played by Ryan Speedo Green. Leporello, played by Nicholas Newton, lets the audience in on a secret: He doesn’t really like Don Giovanni and would leave his employment if given the opportunity.
Much of the comedy in the opera comes from Rachael Wilson’s Donna Elvira, who testifies to Don Giovanni’s depravity to anyone who will listen. The audience knows Donna Elvira has been taken advantage of; but she’s also overbearing, and some characters in the cast recoil when she comes on the stage.
Liv Redpath, who plays Zerlina, has the hard job of convincing us that she loves her new husband, Masetto, but is also intrigued by the world Don Giovanni can open for her. Another couple — Donna Anna played by Rachel Fitzgerald and Don Ottavio played by David Portillo — play to pathos and team with Donna Elvira. Portillo drew a rapturous ovation for his aria, “Il mio tesoro.”
The best part of the opera — at least for this first-time attendee — is how Mozart structured the voices that come out of his characters.
Eight major characters are in the opera, and you hear them both break out their own arias and also sing in concert as if to underline each other’s points or to provide a counterpoint.
For me, Don Giovanni could be compared to Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage, which premiered five years after the Mozart masterpiece and also featured a scheming member of nobility undone by his interactions with the common people.
But the Count in The Secret Marriage is played for laughs, and he finds redemption in the end. Don Giovanni is a comedy, but the game is deadly serious for the title character — and redemption can only come in the next life.