Mangled Mozart

Don Giovanni is an opera which gives plenty of scope for alternative interpretations, as has been very clearly demonstrated in the past 30 or so years, since directors took over as the determining force in productions. But there are certain basic features which any production, to be taken seriously, must respect. The two most obvious are that the Don must be a figure of riveting allure, and that social position is a key factor in the development of the action, at any rate until that gets dispersed in the ill-organised Act II. Once these are in place, there is plenty of room for dealing with such matters as how appealing, as well as alluring, the Don should be; whether it’s just bad luck or dramatist’s judgment that he doesn’t manage actually to seduce anyone during the course of the opera; and so on.

The social issue means that it is difficult to give the work a near-contemporary setting, since neither Don Giovanni’s relationship with his servant Leporello and their peculiar species of interdependence nor his dealings with the peasants Zerlina and Masetto make sense in the present day. The only recourse, if you are bent on updating, is to have a translation that eliminates many elements in the original, and amounts virtually to a new piece.

That is what Jeremy Sams has obliged with: ever more ‘creative’ in his translations, he has now run wild and deserted the sense of Da Ponte’s brilliant libretto to the extent that he must take a considerable part of the blame for the abysmal total result. Sams purveys an all-purpose jokiness which he transports from one opera to another, and which makes every character seem flip, ‘cool’, a member of the contemporary pop-cultural scene at its most depressing.