Don Giovanni König Kandaules Die Zauberflöte Turandot Die Liebe der Danae Roméo et Juliette La Donna del Lago Helmut Lachenmann Jedermann Daponte in Santa Fe Das weite Land Young Directors Joachim Schlömer Concerts 2002 The Unfinished

W. A. Mozart DON GIOVANNI
The secularisation of the modern world is reflected in Faust and Don Giovanni

Looking forward to the year 2006, when we will be celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday, new productions of the entire Mozart repertoire are to be prepared: in the anniversary season his 22 operas will be staged.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt will conduct three of the productions: in 2002 as the opening premiere the new Don Giovanni, in 2003 La clemenza di Tito - both staged by Martin Kusej - and in 2005, for the inauguration of the new Mozart opera house, Le nozze di Figaro. The Vienna Philharmonic will in most cases be the orchestra playing the great Mozart operas.

Faust and Don Juan - two mythical figures

Richard Wagner saw the significance of the myth in the fact that it remains true for all times. The modern world reflected the process of its secularisation in two mythical figures: in Faust and Don Juan. Both were born from scepticism about the achievements of science as well as from doubts about the religious world order. For instance, the Faust in the popular book by Christopher Marlowe ("Try thy brains to gain a deity"), the Burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina as well as Molière's fils criminel, they all venture onto a "forbidden" terrain of knowledge - whether it be intellectually sinful or physically indulgent. At the end of the 19th century they are absorbed into a new myth: in Nietzsche's Superman.

The ambassador of desire

When, on 12 February 1829, Johann Peter Eckermann expressed the hope that someone would finally set to work on a composition of Faust, Goethe replied, "It is totally impossible. The repulsive, offensive, awful elements that it would have to contain go against the time. The music would have to have the character of Don Juan; Mozart should have composed Faust." The lack of restraint of the grandee was out of tune with the times and the bourgeois world in the era of the restoration. During the 19th century, taking as its starting point the interpretation of the opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the libertine aristocrat became the ambassador of desire, which "the citizens will prohibit before too long" (Adorno).

The incarnation of sensual ingenuity

In his Don Juan story E.T.A. Hoffmann had reinterpreted the first scene of the opera by claiming that Donna Anna had been violently deflowered by the night-time intruder. According to a pre-Wagnerian idea of salvation it would have been her duty to make Juan recognise through love "the divine nature inherent in him." Thus Anna became the heroine of an emotional drama, whereas Elvira - the true dominant female figure and an equal match for Don Giovanni - was made to appear hysterical. And yet there is no clear indication either in the course of the story or in musical terms to suggest that Anna had been violated by Giovanni. He is not a rapist, but a seducer or, as Sören Kierkegaard wrote, "the incarnation of sensual ingenuity".
Giovanni wins women by the magical power of eroticism. Leporello's register aria reflects in giocoso form that no woman had ever resisted him. Yet even if Anna remains a virgin, her readiness to be seduced is evident. As Ernst Bloch wrote, in the B flat major aria of the second act ("Crudele... Non mi dir") the grief about her father's death is transformed to the "pain of longing, in a blaze of coloratura, so that nothing is left of Ottavio with Don Giovanni towering behind him".

The model of seduction

In the opera Giovanni embodies and the music incarnates the protest against Christian resistance to physicality, which, as Nietzsche wrote, "gave eroticism poison to drink - it did not die but degenerated to become a vice."
However, where something is prohibited, there must also be desire. According to Bloch, Giovanni is its most sparkling ideal: "the model of seduction". There were 2065 female victims on the list until the year 1787.The opera is set in this period, the reign of Joseph II.
This can be heard in the famous scene when the dances are all played at once by three orchestras as well as in the various musical references - not only Mozart's own from Figaro, which was so popular in Prague. This is the day when for the first time everything goes wrong for Giovanni and he suffers one defeat after another. "Mi par ch'oggi il demonio si diverta d'opporsi a' miei piacevoli progressi; vanno mal tutti quanti ("It seems the devil must be amusing himself at my expense today. Everything is going badly"). This is what he sings in the eleventh scene. In the fifteenth he really lets rip again with the so-called "Champagne Aria".
He plans to sleep with ten peasant girls that night. Mozart's music imitates copulation, something that in most performances is not even hinted at. But the adventure with Zerlina fails. (What happens to Elvira's maid remains unclear).

The end of the erotic age

The end of feudal pleasures has come - the end of the erotic age that Lorenzo Da Ponte celebrated in writing the piece. On his desk was a bottle of Tokay wine and a tin of tobacco from Sevilla, and whenever he rang the bell - "it happened quite frequently" - a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl came to make love with him.

Towards the end of the 19th century the myth had lost much of its power. In the new thinking of Nietzsche and Darwin heaven and hell no longer had any meaning. "Superman" became a myth in which Don Juan and Faust were symbiotically absorbed. George Bernhard Shaw made this the subject of Man and Superman (1903) - described in the subtitle as A Comedy and a Philosophy. In the third act there is an interlude in hell as a dream sequence.
The protagonists meditate and discuss love, whereby the Don Juan myth is reinterpreted in the sense of "life force": the seducer of women becomes the one who is persecuted. In Shaw's play Donna Anna becomes Ann and wants to be the mother of the "Superman". Don Juan on the other hand wants to escape. He intends to seek the evolution of consciousness.

Jürgen Kesting

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Don Giovanni
Sung in Italian with German and English supertitles

Grosses Festspielhaus

New production: 27 July 2002
6 p.m.
1, 4, (6.30 p.m.), 9, 11 (3 p.m.), 16, 19, 21 August 2002
Performances begin at 7 p.m. unless otherwise stated

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