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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Missing the magic touch

Don Giovanni
Royal Opera House

La Rondine
Peacock Theatre

This latest revival, for which the opening night received a great deal of publicity, and which began with Tony Hall, the Royal Opera’s chief executive, welcoming Sun readers and bidding them to come again — but at what price? — sported as distinguished a cast as any the production has had during its six years, and Charles Mackerras in the pit; yet it failed to achieve any momentum, and if it had succeeded, it would have lost it shortly after acquiring it.

I’d be interested to know to what extent the revival director Duncan Macfarland got the singers to develop their own conceptions of their roles. I ask primarily because Simon Keenlyside, who was in strong, supple vocal form, presented the Don as so repulsive a figure that even a dumb and starry eyed Zerlina, such as we had in Miah Persson, would have recoiled rather than been tempted. This Giovanni, though of course athletic and muscular — he began by leaping sideways from an upper window — has a grey complexion, long, unappealing hair, and is too arrogant about his charms to bother to conceal his predatory intentions. The only quality he displays which is unequivocally attractive is courage: he swaggers when the Commendatore speaks in the churchyard, where, incidentally, a large number of mourners are irrelevantly hanging around in the middle of the night, and when the statue enters in the supper scene, with a  vast metal hand swinging above him, one of Zambello’s most gratuitous effects.

The problem with Don Giovanni, as I see it, is that unlike da Ponte’s other two masterly libretti, this one reveals nothing of significance about any character after Act I. In contrast to Figaro, where the characters reveal or discover more of themselves throughout the work, culminating in the sublime final minutes, or Cosi, which is wholly concerned with characters finding that they were completely wrong about themselves and one another, Don Giovanni tells us all we need to know in a series of magnificent scenes and arias, each of them dramatically cogent and musically just amazing — so that by the end of Act I all there is left for the rest of the opera is to manufacture a series of situations, involving the inevitable disguises and mistaken identities of which this work is uniquely full, and then a denouement which is both effective and wholly incredible.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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