Oh, hay. Have you churren made it to Seattle Opera’s new Don Giovanni yet? No? I don’t blame you, but here’s a preview:

If you haven’t read Paul Constant’s excellent review of it, do so right away. He lays bare the problems with the production and directing approach (though, to Seattle Opera’s credit, the teenaged boner for cliché indicators of wit rears its… um… head all-too-frequently in even the world’s most prestigious houses and productions), and he accurately names the two most compelling singer-actors in the cast.

But since I’ve been obsessed with opera since I was fourteen and could talk about it for hours—peppered, of course, with plenty of “Fuck that bullshit”- and “What a ridiculous douche“-type comments about anyone from the stagehands to the singers to the management—I will further explore the details of the performance and production, including first-wave feminism (“Oh, ha ha, that.”), the non-topic of rape (“They were seduced!”), the Pastry class, the suspension of the suspension of disbelief, my usual bitchin’ and praisin’ about the singing itself (as if you care), and a butt-dump of video and mp3 examples.

The production, as a whole, is uneven. When it is good, it is very good, but every so often, I was not able to distinguish between lazily explored themes and accidental symbology. Robert Dahlstrom's set, appropriately, is an imposing megalith that, depending on which windows and doors are lit, looks sometimes to be a huge, black skull and other times a giant headstone to the grave into which the audience is sunk (!!!). In the Q&A after the performance, someone asked about the apparent shallowness of the action, to which Seattle Opera General Manager Speight Jenkins replied, accurately, that the drama does not necessitate it. Most of the action was set near or at the proscenium, yet it never felt cramped or flat. A bigger scene would swallow the action.

The props and costumes were a mishmash of eras (here a Marseille wave, there a powdered wig; here a 1940's jewel-toned trench, there a Starck-style lucite chair), which, according to Jenkins, was intended to convey the timelessness of the legend of Don Juan. The story can be traced to Tirsa de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, but as this chronology of works derived from the story of Don Juan demonstrates, the archetype has reverberated in greater or lesser form through nearly every decade since 1630. Casanova himself was purported to have reviewed Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto and attended Don Giovanni's premiere.

Just as Paul Constant pointed out, Seattle Opera's Don was flat, though I suspect this was not the fault of baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, who fared well within the confines of the production concept. His singing, though, was magnificent; the vowels were clear and plain, and the registration was exceptionally balanced, even into into a fully-integrated and tender head voice, where he executed one perfectly erotic trill during the "La cì darem la mano" duet. However, director Chris Alexander failed in the crucial step of elevating the Don's character past the point of caricature. While the set and costumes indicated timelessness, Don Giovanni himself seemed like a legendary libertine's backward cousin—a sort of bipolar Borat. To make the leap from the libretto to life, it might have been interesting to see the Kwiecien swirl in touches of an effeminate sociopath—perhaps more snake than panther. That is what Don Juan is, afterall. Energetic and explosive, rapacious and unrepentant to the end, he is a fire that burns brilliantly, binding him to death where he lives so fiercely and binding those around him to the immediacy of life where they have none. A sociopath objectifies that with which the "healthy" man empathizes.

Ah, but the alchemy of sociopathy and sex is volatile. Even in the Q&A, Speight Jenkins mentioned that he felt that Don Giovanni did not rape his 2,065 conquests. Rather, he seduced them. The Q&A audience seemed to agree, nodding when someone shouts out "They can't resist him!" Then, tellingly, Jenkins admitted that the production contained vague hints of a supernatural component to the Don's prowess (his red gloves were one). If this is the case, then any conquest added to his catalogue was gotten by means of removing the woman's ability to consent to sex. This is rape, by definition. No wonder his victims couldn't resist! And if he is endowed with a measure of supernatural power to accomplish their rape, it stands to reason that they often seemed to "fall in love" with him afterward. Don Giovanni is a serial rapist and a serial collector of objects—women. This point was further illuminated by Seattle Opera's production, wherein the Don's apartment is decorated with famous female nude paintings in a slideshow, which transitioned with increasing frenzy, each overtaking the frame and erasing the previous.

One character, Donna Elvira, calls Don Giovanni on his shit and takes every opportunity to rally other characters to stand against him. It is thought that her character would have been comedic to Mozart's audience, but for a modern or non-period production, that is debatable, if not irrelevant. I believe that, along with Giovanni's valet Leporello, Elvira is the most complex character in the opera. She is first and foremost a feminist—an observer of her vicinity and a vociferous activist against the status quo (in this case a prison of patriarchy and predation). In the opening act, Elvira's repetition of rage toward Giovanni runs the risk of making her look immediately like a nag. Perhaps this was the comedic element in Mozart's day and the same element that had Saturday's audience laughing at her in her initial tirades. This seems to reflect more about the audience than Donna Elvira. Is a woman speaking her mind about the unjust role of women at the intersection of sex and social norms still, in the 21st century, really something to laugh about? Credit is due to soprano Marie Plette, who has on many occasions proven herself to be an invaluable and dependable asset to the company; her Elsa in Lohengrin captured a youthfulness not often seen or heard in the role, and her Giulietta in Les Contes d'Hoffmann was a both ghostly and intense. Plette was the most complete female artist onstage, committed to making her Elvira engaging—a balance of restraint and fortitude, so as not to come off purely as a nag. Her voice rang with her characteristic silverine quality, which allowed her to give intelligent accent to already clear diction and show off well articulated and dramatic fioriture, despite conductor Andreas Mitsek's slightly under-tempo take on her "Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata." Here's the always hysterical Cecilia Bartoli performing the same aria:

By contrast, Donna Anna is weak, both in character and in portrayal by soprano Pamela Armstrong. Though scholars debate whether Anna was raped or merely seduced by Giovanni, it clear to me in her Act II aria, "Non mi dir," that she has been violated by something other than grief over the death of her father. Armstrong's Anna is lethargic, and by consequence, unsympathetic. This is probably not intended, but it does put Anna's character in the correct perspective. After her rape and her father's murder, she builds her entire identity around her victimhood, almost literally paralyzed by the trauma. More importantly (at least in Mozart's day), she is firmly placed in the nobility, a ridiculous position, to be sure, but no more despicable to Mozart and da Ponte than the others. The same class system does not translate fully today. Today Anna would belong to Pastry class—one fattened both in body and mind by access to high-priced goods and easy social leverage, but containing little substance and so poised to collapse at the slightest touch. She is regressive where Elivira is progressive and Don Giovanni is transgressive. She is unable to move forward or even inward in any way. At the end of the opera, she tells her fiancé Don Ottavio that she would prefer to wait another year before they marry, but by this point, it is too late. She is unmoved by the vanquishing of Don Giovanni's, just as she is unmoved by Ottavio's loyalty and patience. She is in a limbo; she is everywhere but here. It is appropriate, then, that Pamela Armstrong's voice is without a recognizable quality. It shows signs of a former sweetness, but her voice is unconnected to itself. Donna Anna has the most difficult music in the opera, and Armstrong navigated it poorly. On any note above the middle of the voice, she seemed to be singing all the harmonics but not the fundamental pitch—a shame, to be sure, since "Or sai chi l'onore" and "Non mi dir" contain good helpings of coloratura (ungainly and imprecise), sustained high notes (acoustically unsettling), and drama (wholly unconvincing). In any other production, I would've asked for a more linear Donna Anna—one practicing the extreme care and laser-beam intensity of Joan Sutherland in the video below. Somehow, though, Amrstrong's vocal portrayal made sense in the context of her limbic paralysis.

Her Ottavio, Richard Croft, got the loudest ovations of the evening, due entirely to his superb singing. In "Dalla sua pace" he held the rapt audience in silence as he graded each repeated theme in ever-softer (but never slack or croony) tones. Croft also negotiated his "Il mio tesoro" perfectly, allowing Croft to negotiate the long phrases "cercate di asciugar" and "(nunzio vogl'io) tornat" all in one breath, and as easily as John McCormack in this, his absolutely unbeatable recording of the aria from 1916:

Download John McCormack - Il mio tesoro
MP3 [6.6 MB | 220 kbps]

Kevin Burdette's Masetto is a combination Jim Carey and disgruntled cubicle worker, with a voice first constricted by frustration then open and freed by the removal of Giovanni as his competitor. His fiancée Zerlina (Ailish Tynan) plays it pretty titty, with a puffed but mostly inaudible voice.

The character of Leporello is misunderstood as merely a dote, but he is actually complex because his morality is unrecognizable in a world that is given to polarities of belief. Leporello is the Tom Bombadil of the opera; he plays along but is untouched by his master's evil and never suffers for it. Interestingly, Leporello constantly begs his master to give up his treachery, but he is also complicit in it, often arranging and cataloguing the conquests. He is a perfect foil for Giovanni because he lives life despite life. Eduardo Chama plays him masterfully, adding the giocoso to the drama not by going for cheap laughs (this is not a comedy), but by properly moving about the stage in a weightless manner. With a knowing smile, he joins the joke in the final scene, mock-moralizing with the others who believe Don Giovanni to be dead, when in fact he lives on in and through them. Leporello is signifies (even if he is not aware of it) the divine hilarity of being human, even in the face of death. Though Chama's voice is oak-like in its richness and smoothness (Leporello is earth, Don Giovanni fire), he is capable of keeping the rapid consonants running lightly from his mouth during the catalogue aria and the Act II sextet. To his recitatives he lends the appropriate conversational variance—the light and shade so relished by native Italian singers of yesteryear.

As to the end of the opera (where bass Vladimir Ognovenko was wonderfully sonorous but slightly ahead of the beat), I will first offer a video clip from 1999 Vienna production of the opera, starring Carlos Alvarez as the Don, Ildebrando Arcangelo as Leporello, and Franz-Josef Selig as the Commendatore; Riccardo Muti conducts.

Now I will defer to the venerable Sounds & Fury blogger A.C. Douglas, who provides a brilliant exegesis on the treatment of the Stone Guest, Giovanni's "descent," and the finale, about which he says:

My take on that sextet [finale] is that, as I've above remarked, it's an extended, sardonic, and slightly malicious Mozartian joke; one targeted at the bourgeois sensibilities of the audiences of the time, and perpetrated at their expense by Mozart whether those audiences were made up of aristocrats, the middle-class, or the proles, all of which classes Mozart held pretty much in equal contempt (although for different reasons). Mozart knew precisely how those audiences would understand Giovanni's fate: as just recompense and divine retribution for his profligate, sinful, and even criminal life, and would understand it in that way not least because those audiences needed the comfort of knowing that Giovanni had met his end in such a morally decisive manner because of the threat such a one poses to the moral, social, and cultural status quo of the prevailing order. In that closing sextet, Mozart, with a sly and slightly malicious off-stage grin undetectable by most of his audiences, assures those audiences that Giovanni has been dealt with fittingly, and now everything is once more restored to proper bourgeois order with nothing of consequence left to threaten or disturb their good and just bourgeois sleep.

When this sextet is well-staged in the theater, it always takes place after a significant pause subsequent to Giovanni's descent, thereby distancing it dramatically from what preceded it. And if the stage director really knows his stuff (and I've never seen it staged this way, but would pay double the admission price for the entire opera just to see that closing sextet so staged), the sextet would be performed in front of a dropped curtain (i.e., dropped immediately after Giovanni's descent), with all six singers first walking onstage one at a time and lining themselves up across the full width of the stage. Then, when all six are lined up, begin their singing, facing and addressing not each other, but the audience directly. Then would that sly and slightly malicious off-stage Mozartian grin be apparent to all.

Seattle opera pulled this off with excellence. The singers sang in tableau, standing apart from one another in front of a white parachute silk drop. As it turns out, this drop was released accidentally during Giovanni's descent (hence its being caught on a chair), but because of the orange and yellow and red lighting during the scene and because of the sheer quality of the fabric, it appeared to be a guillotine of flame. Easily the finest effect I have ever seen on stage. When the lights come up on the finale, the drop is pure white—a wash after the calamity, separating the finale from the action. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio do not even face each other—she because she will never recover from herself, he because he is too passive to work with what he sees as damaged goods. Zerlina and Masetto seem to be happy, but Masetto has proven himself to be wifebeater, and Zerlina has accepted it like a guest on Jenny Jones ("But I luvv him; y'all don't know hiyim!"). Donna Elvira is fascinating: in this production she has kept Don Giovanni's long, purple coat. Throughout the opera she seems to waver between fury and love toward Giovanni, but really she has clearly gained full knowledge of him. Not by romantic love, but by reason. She even asks the others to take pity on him because she sees him in a way the others do not. She does not condone was Giovanni does (she asks him to change his life toward the end), but she understands what he is—an vital elemental force, beyond his own control, much less hers or the others'. She stands opposite Donna Anna and Ottavio; she will carry the burden of figuring out a world where the old order believes itself victors, when they have in fact only reabsorbed Giovanni's evil and called it divine retribution.