‘Every Carnival Has Its End’ | Nathan Shields

“With blondes, he praises their gentleness; with brunettes, their faithfulness…. The large ones he calls majestic, the little ones charming.” So Don Giovanni’s manservant, Leporello, tells the jilted Donna Elvira. Then the knife twist: “But his greatest passion is the young virgin.” 

The trade neatly captures the ambivalence and amorality of Mozart’s seducer. Don Giovanni, it suggests, has a approach of being all issues to all folks. All through the opera, he’s repeatedly confused with another person. When he and Leporello change outfits, not even their lovers see via the disguise; when he tries to rape the noblewoman Donna Anna, she errors him for her fiancé. The viewers is hardly clearer about his id. Alone among the many opera’s main characters, he has neither soliloquies nor moments of introspection. His flights of lyricism, just like the seduction duet “Là ci darem la mano,” are means to sexual conquest. His nice showpiece, the Champagne Aria, “Fin ch’han del vino,” betrays no indicators of an interior life—solely a relentless, superhuman power. 

Leporello tells Elvira that Giovanni has seduced 1,003 girls in Spain alone. Through the opera he assaults two extra, kills one man, and beats one other half to demise. He lies as simply as he breathes and betrays Leporello with out hesitation. He enjoys the privileges his society affords him, invoking the droit de seigneur at a peasant marriage ceremony, whilst he corrodes society from inside. To Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni embodied the erotic energy of music itself; he was need in its purest kind, “victorious, triumphant, irresistible, and demonic.” Newer interpreters have seen him as an enthralling monster who, within the phrases of the director John Caird, “slowly turns his own heart into stone.”

The opera, like its central determine, has worn completely different faces at completely different occasions. Early critics within the dying days of the ancien régime praised its “beauty, greatness and nobility.” Mozart’s biographer Maynard Solomon, writing in 1995, famous its “jarring fragility and incompleteness.” However Don Giovanni has all the time been elusive. Musically it alternates lucid grace with uncooked violence. Dramatically it lurches between terror and farce, refined sensuality and sadistic laughter, inviting interpretations solely to confound them.

Nowhere is that this extra evident than within the last scene. On the climactic second, a defiant Don Giovanni is dragged into hell, accompanied by a D-minor conflagration within the orchestra. The efficiency appears to be over; at this level, neophytes typically stand and applaud. However no sooner has the final chord died away than the surviving characters rush onstage, eagerly proclaiming the ethical of the story: “The wicked always meet the end they deserve.” The orchestra rounds issues off with a perfunctory cadence. 

The Romantics had been among the many first to search out this epilogue unsatisfactory. Franz Liszt omitted it from his piano fantasia on the opera; many nineteenth-century productions adopted go well with. This mirrored a brand new dramatic sensibility and a brand new view of Mozart’s Don Juan. For a technology preoccupied with eros and the irrational, he took on a cosmic significance. He was now a Promethean insurgent, like Milton’s Devil or Goethe’s Faust (“Mozart should have composed Faust,” Goethe remarked to a good friend). His damnation, removed from placing him in his place, testified to his horrible grandeur. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan”—a form of metafictional fantasy in regards to the opera—Giovanni’s tried rape of Donna Anna turns into a second of transfiguring ardour, and her vengeful pursuit of him the product of perverted love.

Hoffmann’s admiration persists, in cruder kind, in lots of later readings. Within the twentieth century Giovanni turned a Romantic cutout, an existentialist antihero, or (a favourite publicity cliché) “opera’s bad boy.” Even the productions I noticed as a toddler sanitized him, the place they didn’t overtly lionize him. The blunt Italian verb used within the libretto to explain his assault on Donna Anna—sforzar, “force”—was translated as “ravish.” In her examine Rape on the Opera, Margaret Cormier describes one not atypical staging, at Toronto’s Opera Atelier in 2019. As Giovanni grapples with Donna Anna, her “body language is at odds with what she says…. Anna says no, but based on the staging of the scene, she means yes.”¹

Like Cormier, many listeners now perceive Don Giovanni quite in another way. Criticisms of the character usually are not precisely new. “At the end of the charming seduction is rape,” the thinker Catherine Clément wrote in 1979 in Opera, or the Undoing of Girls.² However lately the opera itself has come below hearth. Teachers have implicated it within the conduct of alleged sexual predators, just like the disgraced Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine. Some musicians have professed their reluctance to carry out it. A couple of academic establishments have dropped it from their curricula. 

None of this has significantly challenged its canonic standing, and opera corporations nonetheless put it on, although they appear to really feel the necessity to justify themselves: “Why present Don Giovanni in 2021?,” one interviewer requested the Seattle Opera’s forged. Amongst their solutions: as a result of it’s a “cautionary tale”; as a result of it’s about overcoming abuse; as a result of it “illuminates the powerlessness and trauma of victims.” Such accounts restore, in a special kind, the ethical that the Romantics excised. Don Giovanni embodies not need as such, however pathological male need. Not “masculinity in all of its marvelous splendor and power,” as Hoffmann wrote, however masculinity at its most base and harmful.

This view informs modern productions, which move judgment on Don Giovanni in varied methods. Typically that judgment is enacted inside the drama: in 2007 I noticed a efficiency in Berlin through which, on the finish of the damnation scene, Giovanni’s penis was lower off and flung throughout the stage; in Opera Queensland’s 2018 interpretation, a crowd of bare girls dragged him to hell. Extra typically it’s a matter of characterization. A couple of minutes right into a current staging on the Metropolitan Opera, he shoots Donna Anna’s father in chilly blood quite than killing him in a duel, because the libretto has it.

Stephen Barlow’s manufacturing for the Santa Fe Opera, which I noticed in August, was much less heavy-handed, emphasizing the character’s self-importance and buffoonery quite than his villainy. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Inexperienced portrayed, as Clément wrote of the character, “a pathetic man who does not get what he wants.” The staging had a subtlety not all the time evident in current interpretations; however in its try to chop the seducer right down to measurement, it was unmistakably of its time.

Don Giovanni’s deflation started with the overture, effectively earlier than he would usually come onstage. Through the lacerating D-minor introduction—whose music prefigures the damnation scene, hanging over the opera like an axe—the stage remained empty. Then, with the allegro, the partitions of the set swung open to disclose Giovanni in his house, posing for a portray in his dressing robe. Greater than a dozen different portraits—all sporting the identical pink gown and mock-heroic pose—had been scattered alongside the partitions. The set swung shut once more, concealing this pantomime from view. However by the point Giovanni made his typical entrance within the first scene, pursued by Donna Anna, we already knew he was a pompous clown. 

This set the tone for what adopted. The Santa Fe manufacturing—demystified, amusing, typically arch—confirmed what we have now gained, and what we have now misplaced, in dragging the demon right down to earth.

Don Giovanni unfolds in three giant arcs: the primary occupies Act I; the others divide Act II. Every begins with a sequence of arias, recitatives, and duets—the traditional parts of Italianate “number opera”—through which the person characters pursue their separate affairs. Then it grows extra advanced because the characters are drawn collectively, culminating in an prolonged choral or ensemble scene, of symphonic intricacy and power, that’s on the similar time a scene of collective judgment. 

Twice Giovanni escapes punishment: within the first act he abandons Donna Elvira, assaults Donna Anna and kills her father, then tries to seduce the peasant Zerlina; he flees the masked ball that closes the act simply as his victims are about to precise vengeance. Halfway via Act II they appear to have caught up with him, solely to seize Leporello in disguise. However within the third arc judgment comes within the type of Donna Anna’s father, the Commendatore—or, extra precisely, his statue, which Giovanni has mockingly invited to dinner. Within the finale it arrives at Giovanni’s house with a refrain of demons, demanding he repent. When he refuses, his destiny is sealed. The supernatural accomplishes what society couldn’t.

Giovanni’s downfall appears fated earlier than he units foot onstage. The overture opens with two gestures: a pair of slashing, syncopated chords, D minor and its dominant A significant, and a trudging processional underpinned by a descending chromatic scale—the so-called lamento bass, a time-honored image of grief and anguish. These figures saturate the opera. Violins define that chromatic scale throughout Giovanni’s duel with Donna Anna’s father, touchdown on a jarring diminished seventh chord when he strikes the deadly blow; woodwinds then reiterate it because the Commendatore dies. The cheerful inventory gesture that asserts Giovanni’s last dinner—D-major and A-major chords, with the violins tracing a descending fourth—echoes the syncopated harmonies that started the overture and foreshadows their return. When the Commendatore’s statue seems in Giovanni’s doorway, these syncopations come again with an added shock: the D-minor chord has been remodeled right into a diminished seventh, the identical dissonance we heard when Giovanni’s sword discovered its mark. Coupled with the libretto’s doublings and symmetries—between grasp and servant, fiancé and rapist, the grim final supper and the glittering masked ball—these patterns convey the sense of an occult order closing in on Giovanni because the drama nears its finish.

Barlow’s staging, although conservative on the floor, modified the opera’s authentic scheme in telling methods. First it transposed the motion from feudal Spain to late-Victorian London, changing the aristocracy with the haute bourgeoisie and the Spanish peasantry with cockneys. This alternative, which initially puzzled me—why was the opera set on the earth of Sherlock Holmes?—took on new significance when coupled with the casting. Leporello is commonly forged as Giovanni’s double; in Peter Sellars’s well-known 1990 movie, the 2 roles had been sung by twins. Most productions accept a vaguer resemblance, making the singers the identical peak or similar construct. In Santa Fe, Inexperienced and his Leporello, Nicholas Newton, had been two of three Black singers. 

The third was Soloman Howard, very good and iron-voiced because the Commendatore.³ Howard performed one of many few males within the opera not confused with the seducer. But in Barlow’s staging they had been intently linked, and never simply because, with Newton, they had been the one Black males onstage. Within the finale, quite than showing on the door within the type of a statue, Howard emerged from a type of ridiculous work, clad in a singed pink dressing robe. He was one other double—a haggard portrait of Giovanni’s soul. Inexperienced rushed at him with a carving fork, seeming to stab him earlier than falling to the bottom, the fork protruding from his personal stomach. The ultimate sextet was sung over his corpse. Having uncared for to learn the press supplies, that was once I lastly grasped the opera’s setting: it was the London not of Conan Doyle however of The Image of Dorian Grey.

Initially this ending produced a pleasing frisson, just like the third-act plot twist in a movie noir. Enthusiastic about it afterward, nevertheless, I began to have doubts. The Commendatore has been interpreted in several methods. To Kierkegaard he was Spirit personified, negating Don Juan’s “immediate, sensate life.” To the thinker Bernard Williams his return was a “vast and alarming natural consequence” of the seducer’s life, “rather than a transcendental judgment.” In Barlow’s staging it was neither. When Dorian Grey confronts the mocking face of his portrait, its loathsome options and hypocritical smile, he sees “his own soul…looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgement.” Wilde’s story is a examine within the psychology of guilt and regret—two issues Giovanni conspicuously lacks.

On this sense, Barlow’s imaginative and prescient appeared subtly however crucially at odds with Mozart’s personal. In making the opera much less savage and extra humane, the manufacturing obscured one thing important: paradoxically, Giovanni’s very shallowness, his incapacity for remorse or reflection, offers Don Giovanni a lot of its human depth. This impact is sure up with its style—with the query of what sort of art work it truly is.

Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, known as Don Giovanni a dramma giocoso. The label hints at its ambiguity however doesn’t do justice to its vary. The determine of Don Juan—as he emerged from the Baroque dramas of Tirso de Molina and Molière—was a mythic trickster, with roots within the archetypes of premodern widespread theater; there hung about him the environment of Carnival, the season of license previous Lent.

In a single sense Mozart’s Don Giovanni retains this vintage flatness. It offers, or so we expect at first, not in characters however inventory figures—the rake, the patriarch, the shrew—typically portrayed with a slapstick absurdity. But alongside this, and rising with growing power because the story unfolds, is one thing extra intimate and pained. The result’s an unstable combination of tragedy and farce: in “Là ci darem la mano” Zerlina is hypnotized by Giovanni like a mouse by a snake; then Elvira bursts onstage and chases him away, remodeling him from Svengali into Mr. Punch. The Commendatore’s demise, set to a plangent lament within the woodwinds, transitions into vaudevillian patter: “Who’s dead,” Leporello asks his employer, “you or the old man?”

It’s laborious to seize this full tonal vary in efficiency. Most interpretations emphasize some moods over others. Within the Santa Fe manufacturing, intriguingly, there gave the impression to be two distinct interpretations at work. In case you closed your eyes, Inexperienced was a daunting, protean Don Giovanni, projecting unctuous appeal and heroic energy by turns. In case you opened them, nevertheless, he turned a little bit of a ham, all suggestive eyebrow actions and leering smiles. A lot of the glorious forged appeared equally torn. Rachael Wilson, as Donna Elvira, delivered a masterclass in vocal characterization: within the first act her singing was virtuosic but intentionally harsh and uningratiating; within the second her voice opened up, revealing an surprising tenderness and heat. Vocally her Elvira started as a comedic caricature and ended as a lady in love. However on stage she remained a caricature to the tip. Within the last scene, she crouched over Giovanni’s physique in a pantomime of mourning, mugging for laughs.

What explains this stress between music and motion? In modern opera productions, staging and singing serve two completely different, not essentially appropriate functions. The previous, a lot of the time, is meant to bridge the perceived hole between a piece and its viewers—to carry it according to, or tackle its distance from, modern values. The Berlin Don Giovanni did so via Brechtian alienation; the Met manufacturing by signaling its disapproval. The Santa Fe manufacturing each diminished the title character and softened the opera’s stark contrasts of tone. The hints of parody in “Là ci darem la mano” robbed Elvira’s interruption of its deflating shock; the tried seduction of Elvira’s maid was staged as a comic book defeat; minutes after a brutal beating from Giovanni, Zerlina’s jealous husband, Masetto, walked offstage together with his head held excessive. Taken collectively, these selections smoothed away Don Giovanni’s sadism. The viewers laughed typically, nevertheless it was not often disturbed. 

The singers, for his or her half, tried to make dramatic sense of Mozart’s music—and for that purpose they captured one thing the staging didn’t. The combination of comedian and tragic modes is central to Don Giovanni’s view of character. Initially these modes are personified by two figures: Donna Anna, the avenger and tragic heroine, and Donna Elvira, the discarded lover and comedian shrew. Because the opera progresses, nevertheless, this dichotomy known as into query. Like all that issues most in Don Giovanni, that transformation occurs within the music, and solely secondarily, if in any respect, on the stage.

Like its quick predecessor, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni is descended from the custom of opera buffa, with its carnivalesque temper and disreputable characters. But it’s haunted by the ghost of opera seria—the Baroque custom exemplified by Handel, involved with the dignified passions of heroes and kings. Opera seria depicted these passions in stark, major colours: a typical aria expressed one overriding emotion, or two contrasting feelings schematically opposed; an outpouring of rage is likely to be adopted by a burst of grief in a special key, then repeated primarily unchanged. This formal scheme, in its symmetry and deliberate artifice, mirrored a system of aesthetic values that was already falling out of favor in Mozart’s time. Within the operas that he wrote with Da Ponte, opera seria turned an emblem of non secular immobility, its conventions offering the outward signal of stunted interior lives. Opera buffa, in contrast, got here to indicate the versatile, the changeable, the free.

In The Marriage of Figaro, that freedom is related to the decrease courses, set towards the inward stasis of the ancien régime. Figaro sings the aria “Se vuol ballare, signor contino” on studying that his employer, the Rely, has tried to cuckold him. It’s a show of tightly managed sarcasm, punctuated by momentary bursts of rage; repeatedly suppressed, his anger lastly overflows, destroying the symmetry of the aria as a flooding river destroys its banks. The Rely, in contrast, is imprisoned by his personal social position. When Figaro tips him, he sings the aria “Vedrò, mentr’io sospiro,” which depicts him hemmed in by majestic Baroque ornaments, frozen in a pose of outraged self-importance. It’s not within the the Aristocracy however within the servants, as Williams writes, “that some larger and more spontaneous humanity has triumphed.”

In Don Giovanni the play of types has grown extra elusive and the triumph extra equivocal. Each feminine leads initially converse within the accents of opera seria. We first hear these accents after Don Giovanni flees the scene of his crime, and Anna’s fiancé, Don Ottavio, rushes in. A tense recitative, accompanied by hammering Handelian chords within the strings, introduces one of the alienated duets within the operatic literature. Fuggi, crudele, fuggi!, Anna sings, “flee, cruel man”—as if even now her fiancé and her assailant had been laborious to inform aside. By the tip, her anguish has began to lose its grip. Her last aria, “Non mi dir, bell’ idol mio”—“do not tell me, my love, that I am cruel to you”—begins with a serene unhappiness, then strikes via grief to a dancelike poise, earlier than ending in a flurry of exuberant vocal leaps and plummeting runs. It conveys a rare sense of freedom, sliding from rapt interiority to extroverted energy. But the psychological fact of the music clashes mockingly with the duplicity of the phrases. “You know well how much I love you,” Anna tells Ottavio. Right here, at the very least, most trendy listeners agree with Hoffmann: we don’t know any such factor.

Donna Elvira’s transformation isn’t any much less putting. In her the hints of opera seria are pushed to the purpose of satire: she is a Handelian character misplaced in a Mozartian world, and her look has a comic book incongruity—like a knight from a medieval romance displaying up, absolutely armed, at one in every of Jane Austen’s nation balls. We first encounter her singing a wild parody of a Baroque rage aria, leaping between the extremes of her vocal vary as she swears to tear out her betrayer’s coronary heart. By the tip, she too has damaged free.

However the place Anna escapes the jail of opera seria, Elvira destroys that jail from inside. A stern recitative precedes her last aria, “Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata,” accompanied by the identical Baroque rhythms that launched Anna’s duet with Don Ottavio. As Elvira addresses herself—“Wretched Elvira! What conflicting passions are born within you!”—her resolve crumbles; new melodic figures seem within the orchestra because the concord restlessly shifts about.

What follows is, to all appearances, a textbook da capo aria within the model of Handel: its first part, in E-flat main, exhibits Elvira considering forgiveness; the second darkens to E-flat minor, the Commendatore’s music showing like a shadow within the orchestra as she recounts her need for revenge. Then the primary part returns, its textual content repeated verbatim, although that is no mere reprise. As an alternative, by the subtlest of harmonic shifts, Mozart sends the music spinning off in a special route. The vocal line takes on a brand new power and determination, twisting into an exhilarating show of virtuosity that’s—like the tip of Anna’s last aria—on the similar time a show of ethical power. We hear Elvira shifting past forgiveness to a dedication to save lots of Giovanni from himself.

On stage and within the libretto, that dedication can appear faintly retrograde; within the last scene, Elvira vows to finish her days in a convent. But the music tells a special story, revealing not simply her human mutability however her energy. “Visually, the [operatic heroine] is the passive object of our gaze,” writes the musicologist Carolyn Abbate._⁴ “But, aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice.” Elvira’s story, like Anna’s, culminates in simply such a vocal battering. The textual content speaks of self-sacrifice and the music of triumph.

The 2 girls thus attain a form of synthesis: Anna’s tragedy has taken on a touch of excessive comedy whereas the comedian Elvira has revealed tragic depths. From the simplicity of commedia dell’arte inventory figures, they’ve assumed a residing complexity and inwardness. As Giovanni’s world is closing in on him, theirs is opening up.

These photographs don’t resolve into one another. We would see them, as a substitute, as a form of diptych, one whose topic is Mozart himself. In biographical readings of the opera, Kierkegaard’s conflict of intuition and spirit is recast in psychoanalytic phrases: the Commendatore stands for Mozart’s unforgiving father, Leopold, and Giovanni for Wolfgang the everlasting baby. But Don Giovanni’s basic distinction will not be between the rake and his nemesis however between their shared ethical universe and that of the opposite characters. On this respect the opera is best understood as a portrait of the artist than of the person. On one aspect lies the composer of the Requiem, with its visions of the saved and the damned, on the opposite the worldly artist of Figaro, through which the quotidian touches the divine. Don Giovanni captures, extra absolutely than every other of Mozart’s works, the stress inside him between the archaic and the fashionable—between a world of stark ideas and elemental drives and one in every of changeable men and women.

These footage are interdependent. Giovanni, writes Kierkegaard, personifies “the life principle” within the different characters; “his passion resonates in…the Commendatore’s earnestness, Elvira’s wrath, Anna’s hate, Ottavio’s pomposity, Zerlina’s anxiety, Masetto’s indignation, Leporello’s confusion.” By the identical token, it is just in confrontation with them that he assumes human form. Within the phrases of the Slavicist Boris Gasparov, “He is pastoral in his duet with Zerlina, cynically jocular with Leporello, mockingly deferential to Ottavio, alternately cunning and audacious in his confrontations with Donna Anna, banal—one could even say provincial—in his mandoline serenade to Donna Elvira’s maid.”⁵

If that’s the case, then solely via Anna’s and Elvira’s tales can we perceive Don Giovanni’s. And vice-versa: the opera’s humanism—the sense of grace and forgiving irony that envelops its surviving characters—is sure up together with his chic inhumanity. This poses a dramatic drawback for administrators and performers, since there could also be no solution to demystify Giovanni with out diminishing his victims’ dignity. It additionally poses an ethical drawback for listeners. For Giovanni’s biggest seduction is of the viewers: to attend a efficiency that does him justice is to be lured repeatedly into identification—and to be repeatedly caught up quick. 

Ever since Kierkegaard, philosophers have been haunted by the thought that Giovanni embodies some crucial aspect of our nature: need, vitality, an insatiable thirst for expertise. To Simone de Beauvoir he was the archetype of the “adventurer” who pursues “action for its own sake,” detached to the struggling of others. But his ardour for all times is near, maybe a precondition of, true freedom. “Those who survive Giovanni,” writes Williams, together with

not solely the opposite characters, however, on every event that we have now seen the opera, ourselves—are each extra and fewer than he’s: extra, for the reason that situations on humanity, which we settle for, are additionally the situations of humanity; and fewer, since one factor vitality wants is to maintain the dream of being as free from situations as he’s.

That’s, he represents a power inside us each monstrous and indispensable: a will to life, a boundless self-assertion whose triumph and extinction alike would go away us lower than human.

Close to the tip of the opera, Giovanni sits in his chambers ready for the Commendatore, enthusiastically devouring his banquet. (“What a barbarous appetite,” Leporello remarks.) He’s alone however for his servant and an onstage band. “I want to enjoy myself,” he declares, calling for them to play. They launch right into a medley of operatic hits, most of them now forgotten: first comes a tune from Una cosa rara, by Mozart’s modern Vicente Martín y Soler; then one from Giuseppe Sarti’s Fra i Due Litiganti. Leporello greets each with appreciative noises. “That one I know all too well,” he exclaims on the third—an aria from The Marriage of Figaro. Right here modern audiences chortle in appreciation, belatedly catching on to Mozart’s joke.

However is it only a joke? I’ve all the time discovered the second ominous. The strings palpitate anxiously as Elvira rushes in, pleading with Giovanni to fix his methods; these palpitations flip right into a propulsive rhythmic determine that traces an ascending chromatic scale as she runs again offstage. When it reaches the highest, on a piercing diminished seventh chord, we hear her scream. The method repeats itself as Leporello opens the door, cries out, and slams it shut. On an expectant A-minor concord, Giovanni reopens it. By the point the Commendatore enters—accompanied by a paroxysm of dissonance quite than the anticipated D-minor chord—all aesthetic distance between the drama and spectator has collapsed. Classical readability has given solution to Romantic darkness, tune to a scream, the gorgeous to the chic. 

In Barlow’s manufacturing, even because the Commendatore stepped out of the body of the portray to confront Don Giovanni, the aesthetic body separating each of them from the viewers remained intact. He superior from stage left, at an angle to the viewer, eyes firmly mounted on his killer. Within the performances I keep in mind greatest, in contrast, he appears to be like immediately outward, as if passing sentence on the world. A 2001 staging on the Zurich Opera Home, preserved on movie, units Giovanni’s banquet in an encroaching darkness that merges with the shadows of the auditorium. When the Commendatore’s statue seems, on a scaffold excessive above the stage, he’s gazing into the corridor, his face clean and emotionless. He appears to say—to not Giovanni, however to us—that each carnival has its finish.