Metropolitan Opera’s Don Giovanni review — a rich experience with real-world resonance

Watching the first night of the Metropolitan Opera’s superb new production of Don Giovanni last Friday in New York, I was struck anew by the fact that some operas can somehow brush their 1787 selves off to meet a contemporary moment with uncanny precision. And, when that happens, it makes the (somewhat understandable) accusations levelled against opera (for being too old-fashioned or implausible, say, or culturally irrelevant, or inaccessible) moot. And that the excellence of a contemporary production combined with centuries-old artistic material that is, by most measures, still exceptional, can complicate one’s response to it, generating a few unanswered — or unanswerable — questions.

The richness of the experience I had on Friday — in the same week, incidentally, that Donald Tump, another ultra-powerful and notorious womaniser, was on trial for rape and battery in this very city (charges he denies) — was complex. I tried not to seek resolution for the most confounding questions that always surface around Don Giovanni. Is it just a straightforward morality play, as the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original title — Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, ie The Rake Punished, seems to suggest? Are we humans — especially we females — so weak, so fallible, so gullible? Is Giovanni simply “motivelessly malign”, as Coleridge memorably put it, considering Shakespeare’s similarly perplexing Iago? What is to be made of Donna Elvira’s maddening sympathy towards him in the face of his monstrous callousness towards her, or — the apparently noble — Don Ottavio’s increasing desperation to wed the grieving Donna Anna? Is that all about sex? And what about us, in response to this harrowing — yet occasionally humorous and very human tale — which, confusingly, starts as a gritty character-driven story but ends in a sublime puff of metaphysics? Does the combination of pure charisma, great stagecraft, vocal ability and — largely unparalleled — musical beauty courtesy of the 33-year-old Mozart, apparently no angel himself, complicate our relationship to it? Do we become as complicit as wretched Leporello if we enjoy any aspects of Don Giovanni? And does any of this matter?

In the Met’s impressive and perfectly cast production, Ivo van Hove, the Tony Award-winning Belgian theatre director, together with French contralto-conductor Nathalie Stutzmann (both making their Met debuts), attempt to solve some of the layered conundrums of Don Giovanni with characteristic skill and intelligence. Van Hove and his technical team (including Jan Versweyveld, An D’Huys and Christoper Ash) have created a believable context and texture, with occasionally chilling results. Meanwhile, Stutzmann and the Met orchestra impart a particular energy — a kind of vivacity and lyricism that is underscored by extreme darkness — into Mozart’s already intricate and impeccable score.

From the moment that Don Giovanni (star Swedish baritone Peter Mattei) attempts to rape Donna Anna (soprano Federica Lombardi), who is, of course, betrothed to Don Ottavio (Ben Bliss), then coolly, but mortally, shoots her father, Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s Commendatore, we understand that we are in for an emotional rollercoaster: somehow as dramatically and musically affecting as it is morally troubling.

But in the end, its questions are not so easily resolvable, particularly for any audience member unconvinced by the fate that befalls Don Giovanni (spoiler alert: he’s going into the flames of hell, after a dinner date that goes spectacularly badly). Instead, we could simply take this magnificent production at face value. And what value it is.

★★★★☆

To June 2, metopera.org