Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, this – according to ETA Hoffmann – “opera of all operas”, is familiar to most music stage enthusiasts dozens of times. Berlin audiences feel the same way about Daniel Barenboim, the tireless conductor, pianist and organizer for decades. One could therefore expect a kind of family reunion from the recent meeting of the two – according to a meticulous count of the house dramaturgy, the eighth overall and the fourth in the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. That’s what it actually was, with some good and, of course, worrying symptoms of such gatherings.
Because you don’t have to dismiss every routine, as celebrated here by the conductor and the sonorous Staatskapelle that followed him in a blink of an eye, as “tired”; but almost overripe and comfortably snuggled up in itself – which in reverse also means: hardly ever burning passionately, never existentially – it did have an effect. Barenboim’s deliberately relaxed tempi (the fact that the evening lasted almost half an hour longer than announced in the program booklet was not only due to the excessively long break) often suited the singers and kept most of the ensembles transparent, but in a scene riddled with fear and frustration like in the sextet of the second act they seemed sluggish and dragging.
You can hardly accuse the direction of a lack of consistency
Added to this was the fact that Vincent Huguet’s production, similar to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s two previous Mozart works at the house, seemed confident in terms of plot, division of space and movement logistics, but flat in relief. So instead of the Alps, there was the Black Forest; which is also nice, just not quite as exciting. The director has brought the plot close to the present and rededicated the title hero to the lifestyle photographer – possibly with a small adjoining porn department. The glorious finale of the first act then turns into a 40-year vernissage, from which it follows that Giovanni should be at least in his mid-sixties.
Lifestyle photographer with romantic ambitions: Michael Volle (Don Giovanni) and Elsa Dreisig (Donna Elvira)
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Image: dpa
In fact, the death of the commendatore in Huguet’s opening scene is more of an accident than bad intentions, which immediately changes the level of fall of the whole plot and also revalues the final picture of the court: no more hellish descent, but the removal of a disturber of the peace who has become a nuisance from high society a closed institution, carried out with the help of an obscure troop of paramedics, undertakers and secret police officers, who often played a silent and enigmatic role in the previous pictures.
One can hardly accuse the direction of a lack of consistency in this respect, but the dimming down of the anarchistic, border-breaking potential of the opera. Small, harmlessly playful punch lines were of course always possible, but never became substantial. For example, when a camera becomes a possible murder tool; when Elvira mutates into the revenant of the younger Angela Merkel; or in the lovingly rendered post-coital exhaustion of the same character and her false-flag one-night playmate Leporello. Aurélie Maestre’s stage design, which was brushed on concrete sadness but practicable, and the characterful costumes by Clémence Pernoud provided the appropriate visual framework for this unexciting, secretive perspective.
This exhausting permanent stalker
Overall, it was a good idea to stick to the vocal performances in particular. Michael Volle was not the Giovanni one spontaneously imagines, but his always present, robust vocal charisma and the overall not unsympathetic, sly, manipulative and certainly also oily agility created a very unique character image – including the impressively implemented mental erosion even before the final sedative injection.
Peter Rose’s Commendatore and David Oštrek’s Masetto acted within the limits of dignified solidity, Riccardo Fassi’s Leporello playfully developed a lot of comedic potential, which his vocal charisma did not quite match. In this respect, the vocal opponent of the title hero was rather Bogdan Volkov’s Ottavio with an impressively noble flourishing tenor vibes – as a role model, of course, an undecided, tactical, charisma-pale and eloquent little man like a German foreign politician who has since retired.
The three women of the evening, however, were a pure joy. Leading the way is Slavka Zamečnikova’s Donna Anna, a slender figure vibrating with suppressed sensuality on the ever-dangerous line between pragmatism and self-abandoning the breaking of boundaries, vocally with lyrically flowing fullness and yet appropriate coloratura security. In her soothing songs to Masetto, but above all in her encounters with Giovanni, Serena Sáenz’ Zerlina allowed a by no means innocent, but fresh, unused and spontaneous eroticism to blossom, a phase that Elsa Dreisig’s Elvira had obviously already passed, and not only that in her hysterical game as an annoying permanent stalker behind Giovanni, but also vocally through a compulsively calculated, yet radiant and touching prosody. Within the framework of what the direction allowed – one could read Huguet’s character management apart from the title character as a risk-free, eclectic, statistical cross-section of formative role designs of the past decades – a highly differentiated, versatile portrayal succeeded here.