The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (12 page)

Plot

In Seville, Don Giovanni, a charming but amoral and sexually compulsive nobleman, attempts to rape Donna Anna.
She evades him, but in the ensuing fracas her father the Commendatore is killed by Giovanni.
Anna and her fiancé Don Ottavio swear to take revenge on her attacker, although Anna is not sure of his identity.

Giovanni and his cowardly servant Leporello encounter the hysterical Donna Elvira, a lady from Burgos whom Giovanni seduced and then abandoned.
She is determined on revenge; Leporello explains that he is unstoppably promiscuous, showing her the list of his international conquests recorded in a book – fat ones, thin ones, young and old, blonde and brunette, 1,003 in Spain alone.

Giovanni now begins a heavy flirtation with the gullible peasant girl Zerlina, as she celebrates her betrothal to Masetto.
He woos her with false promises, until Elvira interrupts him.
Anna decides that Giovanni is her attacker, and she and Ottavio join forces with Elvira against him.

Giovanni throws a riotous party at his mansion: Zerlina, Masetto and friends are much impressed by his apparent munificence.
Three uninvited guests appear in masks – Elvira, Anna, and Ottavio.
With his customary bravado, Giovanni bids them welcome and then renews his assault on Zerlina.
As his dishonourable intentions become plain, the masked trio confront Giovanni.
But he passes the blame on to Leporello, and in the confusion manages to escape.

Leporello threatens to leave Giovanni’s service, but is won back with money.
Giovanni and Leporello swap clothes so that Giovanni can pursue Elvira’s maid and put his pursuers
off the scent.
Giovanni beats up Masetto, and the other characters triumphantly corner the person they believe to be Giovanni – only to discover that he is actually Leporello.

Giovanni and Leporello take refuge in a graveyard.
As they fool around, the statue of Anna’s father the Commendatore suddenly speaks, solemnly inviting himself to dinner at Giovanni’s house.
Despite Leporello’s terror, Giovanni is delighted at the prospect of such an amusing guest.
Anna tells Ottavio that her grief for her father is such that she cannot marry him yet.

The dinner finds Giovanni in sparkling form.
Elvira rushes in to beg him to repent, but he brushes her off with contempt.
As she leaves, she encounters the awesome statue of the Commendatore, which enters Giovanni’s house announcing that he cannot partake of mortal food and asking Giovanni to come to dine with him.
Giovanni accepts with alacrity, but when he grasps the statue’s proffered hand, he finds its grip is ice-cold.
Unrepentant to the last, Giovanni is dragged down to Hell by demons.
As the dust settles, the other characters appear.
They review the situation, resolve to get on with their lives and point the obvious moral of Giovanni’s fate.

What to listen for

Musically, the darkest-toned of Mozart’s operas.
The Gothic spookiness of the opening bars of the Overture sets the mood, with its rising chromatic scales and blasts of trombone (an instrument exclusively associated with the vengeful majesty of the Commendatore), and elsewhere in the score there is always an undercurrent of unease and ambiguity to the harmony.
Giovanni himself sings neither high nor low, and the role can be taken by either bass or baritone, so long as he can communicate both energy and charm: he has no long major aria, but his brief explosion of exuberance in Act I, ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’, tests the ability to sing notes precisely at great speed – sometimes one is left with a sense of singer and conductor racing to the finishing line.
In Act II,
Giovanni’s mandolin-accompanied serenade requires a seductive legato and smoothness of tone which is testing in another respect, and basses generally have difficulty lightening their tone for the number.

The role of Donna Anna lies high for any soprano, and her first aria, ‘Or sai chi l’onore’, demands drama, heft and the ability to sustain some top As; the remainder of the role is much more lyrical, with some coloratura in the second aria ‘Non mi dir’ – a passage which Berlioz considered grossly out of character and a great blot on the score.
The best of recent Donna Annas was probably the young Carol Vaness, who was also superlative in the similar role of Elettra in
Idomeneo.
Zerlina may appear pretty and straightforward to sing, but her Act I aria, ‘Batti, Batti’, lies at just the point (E–F, at the top of the stave) at which most sopranos’ voices tire or ‘break’.
Her duet with Don Giovanni, ‘Là ci darem la mano’, is invariably a favourite with the audience.

The two arias for Ottavio are both very grateful to a lyric tenor, but it’s almost impossible to make such a passive character seem credible, let alone sympathetic.

In performance

A great deal of intellectual effort has been spent on analysing the figure of Giovanni and determining his moral status: is he a Byronic rebel, nobly fighting fate and convention in the name of romantic individuality, a sexually compulsive psychotic, or perhaps just an irresistible pantomime rogue?
Maybe he isn’t a hero, but his defiance as the Commendatore exerts his icy grip is certainly admirable, and it’s hard to doubt that Mozart has a sneaking sympathy for him – don’t we all?

The voice of morality is certainly much less appealing.
Anna seems frigidly repressed and self-centred (the German writer E.
T.
A.
Hoffmann famously claimed that she was secretly in love with Giovanni); Elvira is hysterical and hopeless; Ottavio is locked into his role as the gentleman, who claims that he would like to do something to help, but ends up walking politely one step behind the ladies.
The lower classes – Zerlina,
Masetto and Leporello – don’t have much to offer either: they are presented as merely gullible and venal.

Like
Hamlet,
there is something about
Don
Giovanni
that doesn’t quite add up, and this is perhaps why there are so few satisfying productions of the opera: almost every director has had a go at it, but those who are successful at exploring one aspect of the piece – such as the sexual seaminess – invariably seem to have neglected another, such as Giovanni’s deceptive veneer of aristocratic nobility.

Recordings

CD: Joan Sutherland (Donna Anna); Carlo Maria Giulini (cond.).
EMI 5556232 2

Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni); Daniel Harding (cond.).
VC 5454242

Video: Ruggero Raimondi (Don Giovanni); Lorin Maazel (cond.).
Directed by Joseph Losey.
ARTOP 2

Così
fan
tutte
(
Women all do the same
)

Two acts. First performed Vienna, 1790.

Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte

The secret test of lovers’ constancy is an old literary theme, but da Ponte’s twist on it is quite original.
Almost nothing is known about the work’s origins, gestation or reception, though it is amusing to speculate on the irony of da Ponte’s mistress being cast as the first Fiordiligi, while her sister sang Dorabella.
It has also been suggested that Mozart’s unresolved feelings about his wife’s sister Aloysia may explain – unconsciously, at least – his attraction to such a plot.

Nineteenth-century audiences were shocked at what they saw as
Così’s
cynicism, and the libretto was frequently rewritten, usually so as to suggest that Fiordiligi and Dorabella were simply pretending to fall for Alfonso’s ruse.
This
embarrassment prevented the sheer sensual beauty of the score from being fully appreciated, and only since the 1960s, with the opening-up of the debate about sexual behaviour and the morality which attempts to govern it has the opera assumed its rightful place in the standard repertory.

Plot

Fashionable Naples, in the late eighteenth century.
The cynical Don Alfonso is weary of hearing his young officer friends Ferrando and Guglielmo extolling the virtues of their lovers, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella.
Alfonso strikes a wager with Ferrando and Guglielmo, aimed at testing the strength of the ladies’ feelings.
Ferrando and Guglielmo are to pretend that they have been called to the wars.
The ladies bid them a sad goodbye and sink into a state of romantic agitation.
Ferrando and Guglielmo then secretly return at once, disguised as two visiting Albanians.
Without explaining who the Albanians really are, Alfonso enlists the help of the ladies’ maid Despina in the scheme.

At first, Fiordiligi and Dorabella profess themselves heartbroken and shun the Albanians’ extravagant amorous attentions.
Then the Albanians pretend to collapse in front of them, claiming that such is their despair that they have swallowed poison.
They are revived by Despina, masquerading as a doctor.
The ladies are so relieved by the miraculous recovery that their antipathy begins to wane and, egged on by Despina, they decide to indulge in what they think is only an innocent flirtation with their new admirers.
But things swiftly become more serious, as real feelings begin to emerge.
Dorabella, the more relaxed of the two sisters, exchanges lockets with Fiordiligi’s amour, Guglielmo; Fiordiligi holds out a little longer, resolving to don male clothing and follow Guglielmo to the wars.
But when Ferrando appears and perhaps sincerely begs her not to go, she too succumbs.
Alfonso meets up with the disillusioned Guglielmo and Ferrando, and advises them not to take the ladies’ change of heart too hard: all women do the same,
così
fan
tutte.