Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 19th opera – the one sandwiched between “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte,” is described regularly and superlatively with the word “perfection.” This opera is “Don Giovanni,” presented over the weekend by Union Avenue Opera in a production conducted by Scott Schoonover and directed by Jon Truitt. Two more performances are to come, on Friday and Saturday, June 17 and 18, at 8 p.m..
The opera’s full name is far more descriptive of what it is all about – Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (The Profligate Punished, or Don Giovanni). The music was composed in 1787 with words by Mozart’s genius collaborator, the great Lorenzo da Ponte. The premiere was in Prague, where Mozart was basking in radiant popularity at that moment in his too brief life.
Devotion to this opera has persisted for more than two centuries with few interruptions, and praise from everyone from Soren Kirkegaard to George Bernard Shaw has anointed it and elevated it to almost sacred status in the world of art. As one commentator said, remove your sandals as you approach it, as you would when walking on holy ground.
The Don Juan/Don Giovanni myth is familiar, and once you get beyond the evident salaciousness if it, the story and this opera provide magnified reflections of human frailty along with a vivid cautionary tale. It is the account of the licentiousness of a young, extraordinarily randy nobleman, whose successful seduction of hundreds if not more than a thousand women is legend. He is the definition of a libertine – and a lout.
His downfall comes when he makes the lethal miscalculation of mortally skewering a man of considerable consequence whom we know as the Commendatore. He crowns that action by igniting his ego, which is as big as his id, and inviting the ghost of the Commendatore he killed to join him for supper. The ghost agrees to come, and opens wide the door to doom for the Don.
All sounds probable in the improbable world of opera plots. What takes these plots and shakes cosmic relevance into them, and makes them matter to us, is the introduction of a more stupendous ethical meaning, meaning of universal and enduring value, value that should inspire constructive behavior that just might encourage us think twice about behaving recklessly, especially when other people are involved.
Thus, given the facts of runaway promiscuousness and death by duel of a nobleman, and the imposition of aesthetics and ethics into the drama, we understand this is no joke opera about a cad, and that two parallel and mutually dependent tracks exist to convey this opera and its message to a status of greatness.
On track number one is the gleaming aesthetical locomotive – the divine music that issued forth from the prodigious genius of Mozart and the poetry of da Ponte’s libretto. Track two, of equal gravity, is ethics – the bringing home with clarity the revelation that the Don’s unchecked immorality was not simply wild-oatism or an festering infection of his character but a far-spreading and communicable pathology that infected the household of the Commendatore and his daughter, the quite damaged and vengeful Donna Anna, and ended the life of her father.
Furthermore, there is Don Giovanni’s egregious disregard of the emotions of women he seduced or violated, particularly Donna Elvira, who seeks to redeem him. She is presented not only as the particularly aggrieved individual, one living a life of devastation, but also as a symbol for Everyperson, each person seduced and abandoned by the members of the ignoble and vast population of Don Giovannis, male and female.
And certainly we must consider Leporello, Giovanni’s loyal servant and only true friend who symbolizes those who, time and again, must accept compromise and complicity to survive. Suffering in this opera isn’t conscious of rank, and Leporello gets more than his share.
Aesthetics and ethics, therefore, distinguish and apotheosize “Don Giovanni.” Working together in glorious tandem they not only thrill us viscerally but also provide a huge moral lesson, not simply about infidelity but also about the concomitant suffocation and murder of human souls. Quickly the realization comes that this is not just an opera, not simply an isolated situation, but a universal one that operates under the general heading of wanton inhumanity.
Thus, bringing this opera to the stage is not just show biz as usual. Producing it requires a commitment to art’s highest and most rigorous standards, standards that operate well outside the quotidian.
Such dedication was evident opening night at Union Avenue Opera, a company that from its earliest days has reached high and with fearless ambition, particularly in setting the course of its repertory.
An audience member might have license to gripe about some thin moments on the stage and the appearance of an occasional glitch, but you won’t read all about them here. This two-track “Don Giovanni” was performed with dignity and grace, with restrained humor and with attention paid to the glorious music and the stern and obvious sixth-commandment ethics. Those qualities in the end came together in a mystical and eloquent marriage, an institution mortals never achieved in the tragic and melancholy majesty that is Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
