Don Giovanni He carries with him the condition of a cursed character: a conceited stalker, a ruthless rapist and an amoral citizen, wherever he steps he leaves a disgustingly macho stench that is difficult to digest. Lawrence of Ponte wrote about his exploits at the request of Mozart and, with a cheekiness very much of his time, he clearly revealed the character’s nature and, at the same time, surrounded him with no less explicit situations. Zerlina cries like a lamb while she asks Masetto to poke her, tear out her hair and eyes.
And all this is said in the company of Mozart’s music, no less polyhedral although apparently more harmless. Rightly so, both the plot and the score have been subjected to exhaustive analysis, leaving behind an inexhaustible trail of conclusions ranging from the philological to the psychoanalytic, and the possibilities have not yet been exhausted. This is confirmed these days by the staging proposed by the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, in which so many serious things are proposed without ever breaking the simplicity of the disguise and the ease of reading.
Damiano Michieletto designed for the venetian phoenice a ‘Don Giovanni’ whose mask has a clear, almost naive appearance, reminiscent of a theater with eighteenth-century architecture with a clear presence of artifice. The front light, in the manner of footlights, seems to add disturbing shadows; the scenery and costumes point to a period recreation; the actors transiting the tangle on a revolving stage in which the walls overlap and generate impossible perspectives, visually surprising misunderstandings.
Michieletto surrenders to the rich personality of the protagonist and his actions, which he shows in an explicit and cruel recreation tinged with the traces of decadence to which the aging of the walls points. Don Giovanni walks towards him general contempt and yet, his figure, for some reason, is magnified in a mythological dimension.
The brutality with which the director Riccardo Minasi addresses the curtain-down overture points to a fate that sounds hellish. It is not negligible that it is the anticipation of an exquisite realization that turns the score into a kind of spell. That Minasi has gotten from the Orchestra of the Valencian Community Such a sound, with all the additions of instruments and historical uses that you want, is a miracle comparable to Michieletto’s project.
Both walk hand in hand, taking care of the gesture, giving the word a formidable depth, facilitating the air that the interpreters need to give their best, even to make virtue of their faults when the case arises. ‘Don Giovanni’ is an opera full of traps and, for this very reason, it overwhelms the impression of totality, the strength of what is contemplated, the forcefulness of what is suggested and the conjunction of the cast, with Davide Luciano, on behalf of all, dazzling in execution.
Zerlina herself (Jacquelyne Stucker) has something perverse against his traditional lack of courage; his dear Masetto (Adolfo Corrado) is rude but determined, nothing to do with a prototype of softness; Donna Elvira (Elsa Dreisig) drink the winds, even if you don’t want to, by Don Giovanni; and this and Leporello (Riccardo Fassi) they form an impeccable duo, with almost equal voices, and with a subversive spirit. Donna Anna (Ruth Iniesta) and Don Ottavio (John Hall) make a decidedly avenging couple.
The fact that everyone manifests at some point of weakness his admiration for Don Giovanni It is especially important because it reveals an idea that, little by little, is taking shape, giving meaning to the always uncomfortable and moralizing ending, so many times discussed and, so many times, poorly fitted into the representations. It begins to be sensed at the exact moment when Zerlina humbles herself and Don Giovanni walks around her, or when Donna Anna revels in the memory while the dissolute emerges like a ghost.
Perhaps it is worth asking: does Don Giovanni exist? And the answer comes at the end, when in the darkness a desolation scenario, with everyone dead, just before the moment of the moral arrives. Because then Don Giovanni appears, coming from the abyss to numb one by one that they fall surrendered by the nightmare. It is inevitable to leave the Palau feeling the uncomfortable impression that Don Giovanni is still close.