Beautiful Evil: Mozart's Don
Giovanni at the Mannes Opera
By Spengler
Is it
possible to thwart evil, when evil is rich,
beautiful and clever? Western writers asked that
question in the form of nearly two thousand
variants of the "Don Juan" story, of which one -
Wolfgang Mozart's opera Don Giovanni -
holds modern audiences spellbound; it premiered in
October 1787.
Mozart's masterpiece is a
self-referential sort of problem, a foundational
work of Western civilization whose subject is the
inadequacy of Western civilization. It may seem a
distraction to
dwell on details of
performance practice that speak to a minority
within a minority of music listeners. But our
capacity to perform and hear Mozart's opera as he
intended it really is matter of existential
importance for the West, and not only the West; if
the small matter of containing talent and evil
personalities seems remote, read the last month's
news from Beijing.
Don Juan, by the time
we encounter him in Mozart's version, has seduced
more than 2,000 women and killed considerable
numbers of their male relatives. The other
personages in the opera, who represent all the
estates of civil society, are powerless to stop
him; he can outfight, or outwit, or (in the case
of the women) seduce them. Finally the statue of
one of his victims stops by for dinner and drags
him to hell, which hardly is a solution. The
remaining characters, noble, bourgeois and
peasant, are as stupid and feckless as they were
before.
By a quirk of programming, New
York City this year saw three separate productions
of the work, a pedestrian production at the
Metropolitan Opera as well as student versions at
the Julliard School and its smaller but more
refined competitor, the Mannes College of Music.
And by one of those one-in-a-million
confluences of talent and luck, the Mannes version
under the baton of Joseph Colaneri came as
close as possible to recreating the opera's
opening night in Prague two and a quarter
centuries ago. After seeing scores of versions
over half a century, I finally feel that I have
heard the opera the way Mozart's first-night
audience did. Sadly, you cannot: the last of three
Mannes performances occurred on May 6. Perhaps
some philanthropist will sponsor a world tour.
Like an Old Master painting obscured by
centuries of lacquer and dirt, Don Giovanni
has become less accessible over time. Mozart draws
caricatures in whom we should see ourselves. That
demands an intimate setting rather than a
steroidal modern opera house.
Mozart's
singers, moreover, were young - his first Don
Giovanni was the 21-year-old Luigi Bassi, as young
as Suchan Kim or Ricardo Rivera, who sang on
alternate nights in the Mannes version. Young
people take musical as well as dramatic risks, and
Mozart requires risk. Don Giovanni,
moreover, is an ensemble opera first and foremost:
it is the interaction of the characters and their
responses to each other that keeps the electricity
flowing.
It demands chamber-music skills
and subordination to the ensemble of a kind that
the professional music world does not foster.
Singing superstars are not paid to enhance the
contributions of their colleagues, but rather to
upstage them.
That, paradoxically,
explains why Colaneri's kindergarten did an
incomparably better job than the Metropolitan
Opera under the hapless Fabio Luisi earlier this
year. Technical capacity no longer is a constraint
among the top cut of music conservatories; Mannes'
opera program has become such a sure springboard
for professional careers that the small school
rejects a dozen opera applicants for each one it
accepts.
To qualify for the Mannes
orchestra, moreover, young instrumentalists must
be able to play anything in the repertoire
flawlessly. Colaneri asked the strings for
preternatural articulation at speed, and they
followed him enthusiastically. Mozart is in some
ways the edgiest of composers, with more
compressions and expansions of phrase, endless
extensions and sudden halts, than any other: he
twists time into knots, because he can, and enjoys
doing so. I have never heard a reading so
consonant with Mozart's musical personality.
Colaneri conducts regularly at the
Metropolitan Opera and other major venues (most
recently he led the Met's Tosca broadcast
performance). But he has worked miracles with the
Mannes opera program [1] that he built from a bare
foundation over the past decade.
These
young people are not ego-driven divas or
orchestral players punching a clock, but his
students, whose enthusiasm made them follow the
maestro over musical torrents and abysses, without
ever crashing once.
Such crashes happen
all the time. At the opening night of the Met's
new production, [2] Fabio Luisi brought the
strings into the Allegro section of the overture
(measure 31) too fast; the Met players couldn't
keep up with him, and were unable to finish the
phrase before the woodwinds answered at measure
38, such that the two choirs crashed into each
other (James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera's
music director now sidelined by health problems,
executes this perfectly at minute 1:40 in this
version). [3] Conductorial mishaps abounded at the
Met; the young Mannes players were nearly flawless
by contrast.
The Met, to be sure, had
bigger singers, but the cast was strong overall,
and several of the young singers in the Mannes
production should have big careers. I've waited
half a century to hear the trill and appoggiatura
executed correctly in measure 110 of Donna Anna's
aria "Non mi dir," as Liana Guberman did. Adam
Bonanni as Ottavio is a tenore di grazia
who recalls Tito Schipa. As Giovanni, Ricardo
Rivera combined a sinister magnetism with unerring
vocal control.
This is the point at which
the non-musical reader will interject, "And I am
supposed to care because ...?"
There is a
reason that the Don Juan story dominated the
Western imagination for 200 years, from his first
appearance in the 1630 play Trickster of
Seville by the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina,
to his farewell tour in Lord Byron's eponymous
epic. Tirso, the descendant of Spanish Jews
forcibly converted to Christianity, invented Juan
as a theological paradox.
He is a
brilliant and charming young man of the high
nobility who happens to enjoy rape and murder. But
he is a conventional Catholic who acknowledges the
saving power of the Church and the attainability
of salvation through the exercise of free will.
"What a long time I have to pay it back!" is
Juan's refrain ("Que largo me lo fiais,"
the play's alternate title): he is young and has
years left in which to rape and murder before he
repents.
Don Juan is a Jewish joke, I
argued in a recent essay for Tablet magazine:
Don Juan exists to prove by
construction that a devout Christian can be a
sociopath, and by extension, that the Christian
world can be ruled by sociopaths. The
Enlightenment's most insidious attack on
Catholic faith, then, came not from atheists
like Voltaire, but from a Spanish monk with
buried Jewish sensibilities.
A century
and a half later, another converted Jew -
Emmanuele Conegliano, known as Lorenzo da Ponte
- reworked Tirso's play as a libretto for
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the result was an
utterly unique work of art. It is pointless to
argue about whether Don Giovanni is the best
opera ever written, because it is a genre unto
itself - the musical tragi-comedy, or "drama
giocoso", as Da Ponte put it. Mozart's
combination of tragic and comic elements turns
the world inside out. From the first bars of the
orchestra to the final note, we are unsure
whether we should laugh, cry, or feel fear. If
you don't leave the theater confused, you
haven't been listening. [4]
We
typically are entreated to regard Western
civilization as a marble monument which we should
contemplate in reverence. There are any number of
marble monuments, to be sure, which one should
contemplate in reverence, and some marvelous
literature which presents the world in the orderly
fashion - the Paradiso section of Dante's
Divine Comedy, for example, which manages
to combine the highest sublimity of language with
the utmost tediousness of content.
But the
definitive works of Western civilization are the
self-referential ones, which expose the flaws in
the underlying structure, starting with plays of
Sophocles written after Athens' catastrophic
defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Mozart does not
ask you to sit back and contemplate Beauty: he
pokes and pinches and tugs and teases, until he
drags you into the midst of the comedy. It is a
comedy, in that all of his characters deserve what
they get; the tragedy is ours.
The trouble
with Don Giovanni is that Mozart's
librettist, the witty Lorenzo da Ponte, bungled
important elements of the original Don Juan story,
following the example of other 18th century
Italian versions. Giovanni murders the father of
one of his (prospective) rape victims, Donna Anna.
At the opera's conclusion the father's
statue demands that Giovanni repent, and Giovanni
refuses in a last expression of churlishness.
Rather than the orthodox but sociopathic Catholic
of Tirso de Molina, da Ponte gives us an
Enlightenment villain who refuses to bow to divine
will out of sheer spite. Tirso's Don Juan would
have taken the statue's deal in a heartbeat, since
he is a believing Catholic. The theological
paradox at the center of the comedy is obscured
(if we can save ourselves by free will, then we
can postpone our salvation by free will and
continue to do unspeakably evil things in the
meantime).
In Tirso's original, what
motivates Don Juan is not so much sex but evil. He
enjoys killing the men as much as enjoys raping
the women, and he gets as much pleasure by
cheating prostitutes of their pay as he does by
sleeping with them. Da Ponte too often reduces
Tirso's theologically-informed lampoon to the
clowning of the Venetian commedia
dell'arte, the stylized buffoonery of stock
characters.
What Da Ponte confuses,
though, Mozart clarifies in a musical score that
illumines his characters more vividly than words
can. The devil in Mozart lies in the details,
though, and the effect of the whole depends on
control of countless nuances. He is like a god -
not the God, of course, but a god.
There are no minor characters in his work,
because any person whom Mozart chooses to
characterize is endowed with an entire world of
musical detail. Thanks to Mozart we relive the
travails of his dramatic personages more
intensively. Tirso's theological joke, in Mozart's
hands, takes shape in our senses and becomes
experiential as well as intellectual.
Mozart allows us to relive our past, to
get inside the lives of the people who made the
West what it was, and, too often, what it should
not have been. When the young singers of the
Mannes Opera threw themselves into their roles, we
were back in the Prague of 1787, hearing Mozart's
world through Mozart's ears.
There is
nothing reassuring about it: Mozart was a ruthless
critic of his world, but masterful at bringing out
the beauty even in the silliest and nastiest of
situations. We shall never make sense of where we
are without looking back at where we came from,
and we rely on institutions like Mannes to
maintain a fragile, living link to the past. Apart
from the fact that the music-making was
delightful, it is also indispensable.
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