On Saturday afternoon, I attended my first opera of the season at the Met. I thought it an auspicious beginning to the new season to start with the greatest opera ever composed - Don Giovanni.
This was the second collaboration between Mozart and the Italian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte. While credit for the opera's enduring popularity is most often given to Mozart - and rightfully so, for this is perhaps the greatest music he ever composed - it would be a great mistake to overlook the contribution made by his librettist. Da Ponte, no matter how picaresque a character, was a true child of the Enlightenment. He, better than most, realized that the days when opera was a pastime only of an entitled aristocracy were fast coming to an end. It was really he who saw the possibility of replacing opera seria, with its plots taken from ancient history and classical mythology, with an entirely new operatic form that was no longer inspired by antique themes. In Don Giovanni, he took a morality tale that had been treated countless times before and made of it a proto-Romantic vehicle in which the protagonist defied conventional mores and even the threat of eternal damnation in order to live his life as he saw fit.
It's the ending of the opera that's problematic. If regarded purely in terms of dramatic function, the finale should obviously come when the unrepentant protagonist is dragged off to hell by the Commendatore's ghost. Not only is this musically one of the most powerful moments in all opera, it is the point to which the audience's expectations have been deliberately led through both acts. It serves to bring the action full circle from the opening scene in which the Commendatore is murdered and vengeance is sworn ("Ah, vendicar, se il puoi, giura quel sangue ognor!"). The closing scene seems almost grotesquely anti-climactic and its moral forced ("Questo è il fin di chi fa mal, e de' perfidi la morte alla vita è sempre ugual"). But its seemingly incongruous inclusion is not arbitrary. The reason for its placement is set forth quite clearly in Da Ponte's memoirs:
"The finale must, through a dogma of the theater, produce on the stage every singer of the cast, be there three hundred of them, and whether by ones, by twos, by threes or by sixes, tens or sixties; and they must have solos, duets, terzets, sextets, tenets, sixtyets; and if the plot of the drama does not permit, the poet must find a way to make it permit..."
Of course, the one singer necessarily missing from all this tumult is the most important of all, Don Giovanni himself.
It's interesting that Da Ponte should have chosen Seville as the setting for the opera. Although the Met's program notes describe the city as "a mythical world of winding streets, hot-blooded young men, and exotically beautiful women sequestered behind latticed windows," Da Ponte's good friend Casanova painted a starkly different picture of Spain in his memoirs. In fact, the country was at this time still an extremely repressive society and the dread Inquisition was still in existence. It was a dour world that had no place for a real life Don Giovanni and Casanova moved on as soon as he was able.
The performance itself was competently done - if lacking in inspiration - with Fabio Luisi, the Met's principal conductor, leading an excellent cast that included Simon Keenlyside in the title role and Adam Plachetka as Leporello. As the afternoon dragged on, though, the performance never really caught fire or inspired the imagination. Not helping matters was the 2011 production by Michael Grandage that was so dark and gloomy that it was difficult at times to see what was happening onstage. Such a wonderful work deserves better.
No comments:
Post a Comment