Synopsis

Act I
Spain, mid-18th century. Leporello, servant to the nobleman Don Giovanni,
keeps watch outside the Commendatore’s home at night. Suddenly, the
Commendatore’s daughter, Donna Anna, comes running out, struggling with
the masked Giovanni. The Commendatore appears and challenges Giovanni to
a duel. Giovanni easily dispatches the older man, and he and Leporello escape.
Anna returns with her fiancé, Don Ottavio, and asks him to avenge her father’s
death.

The next morning, Giovanni and Leporello encounter one of Giovanni’s former
conquests, Donna Elvira, who is devastated by his betrayal. Leporello explains
to her that she is neither the first nor the last woman to fall victim to Giovanni
and shows her his catalog with the name of every woman Giovanni has seduced.

In the country near Giovanni’s home, peasants celebrate the marriage of Masetto
and Zerlina. Giovanni flirts with the bride-to-be, telling her that she is destined
for a better life. Elvira interrupts his seduction and urges Zerlina to flee. She
also warns Anna, who is still unaware of the identity of her father’s murderer and
has asked Giovanni for help in finding the man, not to trust the Don. Giovanni,
for his part, insists that Elvira is mad, and Anna and Ottavio wonder what to
believe. As Giovanni leaves, Anna suddenly recognizes his voice as that of the
murderer. Devastated but determined, she once more asks Ottavio to avenge
her. He wonders how to restore her peace of mind. Giovanni, who has invited
the entire wedding party to his home, looks forward to an evening of drinking
and dancing.

Outside Giovanni’s home, Zerlina asks Masetto to forgive her. Giovanni leads
them both inside. Anna, Elvira, and Ottavio appear in masks and, unrecognized,
enter the party.

In the ballroom, Giovanni dances with Zerlina, then tries to force himself on her
in an adjoining room. Her cries for help prompt Giovanni to blame Leporello.
Anna, Elvira, and Ottavio unmask themselves and, along with Zerlina and
Masetto, accuse Giovanni. He is momentarily caught off guard but manages to
slip away.

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Act II
Having exchanged clothes with Giovanni, Leporello takes Elvira on a nighttime
stroll, leaving his master free to serenade her maid. When Masetto arrives with
a band of peasants to hunt down Giovanni, the disguised Don sends them off in
various directions, then beats up Masetto. Zerlina finds her bruised fiancé and
comforts him.

Later that night, Leporello—who Elvira still believes to be Giovanni—is surprised

In a cemetery, Giovanni and Leporello find a statue of the Commendatore,

Once again, Ottavio asks Anna to marry him, but she replies that she will not do
so until her father’s death has been avenged.

Elvira arrives at Giovanni’s home. She makes a last attempt to persuade him to
change his life, but he laughs at her. The statue of the Commendatore appears
and commands that Giovanni repent. He refuses and is consumed by flames.
Left behind, Elvira, Anna, Ottavio, Zerlina, Masetto, and Leporello contemplate
their futures and the fate of an immoral man.
In Focus

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Don Giovanni
Premiere: National Theater (now Estates Theater), Prague, 1787
Aided by his ingenious librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart approached his
operatic retelling of the Don Juan myth from a point of view that is neither tragic
nor entirely comic—but rather lighthearted, urbane, and ironic. Over the course
of a night, a day, and another night, we follow the title character and his earthy
comic sidekick, Leporello, through a series of encounters that begins with a
fatal duel, moves back and forth between the humorous and the sentimental,
and ends with the protagonist being dragged down to Hell by a vengeful,
ghostly reincarnation of the Commendatore. Buoyed by Mozart’s nuanced and
insightful score, the opera still rings with psychological truth after more than two
centuries after its premiere.

The Creators
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was the son of a Salzburg court musician
and composer, Leopold, who was also his principal teacher and exhibited him
as a musical prodigy throughout Europe. His achievements in opera, in terms
of beauty, vocal challenge, and dramatic insight, remain unsurpassed, and his
seven mature works of the genre are pillars of the repertory. The extraordinary
Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) led an adventurous life in Venice and Vienna.
He converted from Judaism as a youth and joined the Catholic Church, where
he took Holy Orders. He supplied libretti for the prominent composers of his
time, including Antonio Salieri, and collaborated with Mozart on Così fan tutte,
Le Nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni. Da Ponte migrated to America and
eventually settled in New York, where he served as the first professor of Italian
at Columbia College (now University) and was instrumental in developing an
audience for Italian opera. The myth of Don Juan appears to have first made it
into print in the play El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra (The Trickster
of Seville and the Stone Guest, 1630) by the versatile Spanish author and priest
Tirso de Molina (1579–1648).

The Setting
The city of Seville in southern Spain, where the legend of Don Juan plays out,
was already famous in Mozart’s time as a mythical world of winding streets,
hot-blooded young men, and exotically beautiful women sequestered behind
latticed windows, or “jalousies” (which gave us our English word “jealousy”).
The Met’s current production places the action in an unnamed Spanish city in
the mid-18th century.
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The Music
Mozart’s score for this opera teems with the elegance and grace that marks his
entire output, which is already evident in the ravishing overture. This musical
refinement is combined with extraordinary dramatic expression. Don Giovanni’s
famous Act I aria “Fin ch’han dal vino” (the so-called “Champagne Aria”) is
exhilirating but almost vulgar in its graphic depiction of the character’s sexual
obsession. The ineffectual loveliness of the tenor Don Ottavio, on the other hand,
is depicted in the long, languid lines of the character’s two ravishing solos, “Dalla
sua pace” (Act I) and “Il mio tesoro” (Act II). Donna Anna’s nobility—and perhaps
her intransigence—are well reflected in her major arias, “Or sai chi l’onore” in
Act I and “Non mi dir” in Act II. The buffoonish (yet astute) Leporello is funny
throughout the opera, but his Act I aria “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” (the
“Catalog Aria”) is also a towering example of the melding of words and music.
Donna Elvira’s Act II aria, “Mi tradì,” contains extravagant leaps and runs that
express the emotions of a person barely holding on to her mental stability.

Met History
Don Giovanni appeared at the Met in 1883 during the company’s first season.
Victor Maurel, Verdi’s original Falstaff, portrayed the title character in several
performances during the 1890s, and in 1908, Gustav Mahler conducted an
impressive cast, including the legendary Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin as
Leporello. Mahler even played the harpsichord recitative accompaniment himself
on a modified piano. A new Joseph Urban–designed production premiered in
1929, conducted by Tullio Serafin and featuring the Italian bass Ezio Pinza, as the
title Don, in what would become his most celebrated role. Cesare Siepi took over
for the subsequent generation. The great Austrian conductor Karl Böhm made
his company debut with this opera in 1957. Great interpreters of the title role have
included Sherrill Milnes, James Morris, Ruggero Raimondi, Dmitri Hvorostovsky,
Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Samuel Ramey, the last two alternating with each other
in the role of Leporello. Many great sopranos have appeared as Donna Anna:
Rosa Ponselle, Zinka Milanov, Dame Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price, Renée
Fleming, and Eleanor Steber, who had previously made her mark as Donna
Elvira. The opera has also showcased such diverse singers as Pilar Lorengar (Met
debut, 1966), Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Karita Mattila, and Susan Graham (Elvira);
Carol Vaness (Elvira and Anna); Ljuba Welitsch (Anna); Anna Netrebko (Anna and
Zerlina); Kathleen Battle, Roberta Peters, Teresa Stratas, Frederica von Stade,
Dawn Upshaw, and Bidu Sayão (Zerlina); Sir Bryn Terfel (Giovanni and Leporello);
René Pape and Paul Plishka (Leporello); and Nicolai Gedda, Beniamino Gigli,
and Jan Peerce (Ottavio). Michael Grandage’s production premiered in October
2011, with Fabio Luisi conducting Barbara Frittoli, Marina Rebeka, Ramón Vargas,
Luca Pisaroni, and Peter Mattei in the title role.
Program Note

“M
ozart had experienced how much the Bohemians appreciated
his music and how well they executed it,” wrote one of Mozart’s
friends after the composer’s death. “This he often mentioned to
his acquaintances in Prague, where a hero-worshipping, responsive public and
real friends carried him, so to speak, on their shoulders.” Mozart must have loved
his time in Prague, where he finally received the recognition he badly wanted
and felt he deserved but never quite achieved in the more staid, aristocratic
Vienna. His love affair with the Bohemian city began in January 1787, a month
or so after a production of his Le Nozze di Figaro—which had premiered to
only modest success in Vienna earlier in 1786—had taken Prague by storm. The
opera orchestra and some wealthy admirers of the work paid for Mozart to visit,
and he was amazed at what he found:

I was very delighted to look upon all these people leaping about in sheer delight to
the music of my Figaro, adapted for noisy contra-dances and waltzes; for here nothing
is discussed but Figaro; nothing is played, blown, sung, or whistled but Figaro; no
opera is succeeding but Figaro and eternally Figaro; certainly a great honor for me.

Mozart brought with him on his visit the newly completed Symphony No. 38,
which he had written in the city’s honor, and this too met with tremendous
enthusiasm from the public and enjoyed repeated performances. Unfortunately,
he was able to soak up the adoration for less than a month before returning
to Vienna, but he left with a commission in hand for another opera—this time
one that would have its premiere in Prague. The new opera was to become
Don Giovanni.
Myths and legends regarding the composition of Don Giovanni abound, chief
among them that the music was written in an impossibly short amount of time in
the few weeks leading up to its October 1787 premiere. And as with most such
tales, there is a kernel of truth in the story. Mozart—always known for his frenzied
work rate—wrote much of the recitative as well as some of the comical scenes in
the weeks preceding the premiere. Most amazing—and most oft-referenced—is
that he wrote the overture truly at the last moment, either the day before or the
day of the opening, so that the instrumental parts were barely able to be copied in
time. But these were the items that Mozart always saved for last when composing
operas; the major arias and ensemble numbers had been in the works for months,
since shortly after his return to Vienna in February. Mozart accomplished many
seemingly miraculous feats, but even he could not have written, rehearsed, and
produced a work such as Don Giovanni in three weeks’ time. It is impressive
enough that he was able to write it in less than a year, despite also turning out
three quintets, a sonata, and the divertimentos Ein Musikalischer Spass (A Musical
Joke) and the famous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik—not to mention dealing with the
news of his father’s death—during the same span.
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 Mozart did the sensible thing and approached Lorenzo Da Ponte, the
librettist with whom he had collaborated to such great success on Le Nozze di
Figaro, as a partner for Don Giovanni. And though many scholars have argued
that Da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni is dramatically a bit of a mess, only
saved by Mozart’s transcendent music, it is important to acknowledge that the
Italian playwright was working with a very difficult and complex subject. The
Don Juan myth had been the subject of numerous literary, dramatic, musical,
philosophical, and popular interpretations, each with its own angle and varying
details. To tackle such a well-known subject at significant length (enough to
support a full-length opera), sustain dramatic tension, and provide a text that
lends itself to music is no mean feat. In its knitting together of so many different
ideas and influences, it is true that the Don Giovanni libretto does not have the
surgical precision and seamless construction of Da Ponte’s text for Figaro. But in
sacrificing those attributes, it allows greater freedom. It offers more opportunity
for the music to be the decisive voice, making the connections and filling in the
gaps left by the text—an opportunity Mozart seized to the fullest.
By this time in his life, the composer had completely left all of his
contemporaries and his younger self behind and was turning out masterpiece
after masterpiece as if he were incapable of anything else—and perhaps he was.
The music of Don Giovanni is a wonder, at once both an apotheosis of 18th-
century Italianate opera and a startling premonition of Romanticism, Wagnerian
music drama, and even the psychological dramas of the 20th century. Mozart’s
most forward-looking opera, Don Giovanni was unsurprisingly the work most
appreciated by the composers of the next century. As the great critic Harold
Schonberg wrote, “It is the most Romantic of Mozart’s operas, just as it is the most
serious, the most powerful, and the most otherworldly. … Mozart was constantly
misunderstood by the 19th century. He was called the Raphael of music, and
was considered an elegant, dainty rococo composer who just happened to
have composed Don Giovanni.” Though operagoers, musicians, and scholars
will never tire of debating which of Mozart’s operas are the “greatest,” this is
certainly one of his most widely loved, even today.
But if Don Giovanni is among Mozart’s most enduring and popular operas,
it is also one of his most ambiguous and difficult to interpret. In his own catalog,
Mozart labeled the work an “opera buffa,” or “comic opera.” But it is difficult to
accept that this tale of obsessive promiscuity, infidelity, sexual assault, murder,
and the dragging of the protagonist into the yawning mouth of Hell is purely a
light-hearted, humorous work. Yet there are moments of genuine comedy, and
since the impetus for its composition was a commission specifically for a follow-
up to Le Nozze di Figaro, Mozart was surely sensitive to the expectation of levity.
Da Ponte called Don Giovanni a “dramma giocoso” (a work that combines
serious roles with comic ones). This seems closer to the mark, but the fact that
 the distinction is based on the combination of serious and comic roles brings up
the most important reason for the opera’s ambiguity. The tone of Don Giovanni
is wholly dependent on the production and the singers’ interpretations of their
parts. The title character can be played as a debonair, confident “bad boy” who
seduces his women and the audience into ignoring his dark side. Or he can be
played as a vile and violent criminal who rapes and kills to get what he wants.
Likewise, Donna Elvira can be a tragic and pitiable shell of a woman, driven mad
as she’s strung along by the cruel don, or she can be a humorous caricature, her
outbursts made so broad and outsized that they become ridiculous. And so on.
For this reason, perhaps more than any other opera, Don Giovanni is different
with each production. No matter how many times we see it, we never really
“know” it, and so it draws us back again and again.

—Jay Goodwin
Jay Goodwin is the Met’s Editorial Director.

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