Salzburg: Day 5, Don Giovanni

Of the two Mozart operas in production this year, I chose Don Giovanni because it is one with which I am the most familiar. The other one is La Clemenza di Tito which I hardly know at all. I have actually played in Don Giovanni years ago--there is a brief mandolin part that accompanies an aria. I noticed last night that Teodor Currenzis had, not only a mandolin in the pit, but also a theorbo and what looked like, from a distance, a Baroque guitar. At intermission I got a shot of the Baroque guitar and mandolin, but not the theorbo, but trust me, it was there (though not very audible).

The orchestra pit at intermission with the mandolin and Baroque guitar chatting.

Let me hasten to say that I can't possibly give a review of this performance! I would have to see it four or five more times, study the score in the arrangement that Teodor Currenzis is using (has created) and probably, just be a lot more wise and informed than I am. It is not often that I walk out of a performance at the end feeling truly inadequate to what I have just seen and heard. But in this case, yes. But I do have some observations about the unique appeal of opera.

Just one of the many surprising images from Don Giovanni

Yes, they really did lower a buggy down to the stage at one point--I'm not sure why! They also lowered a four-door sedan (it might have been a Tesla) as well, nose down, but it just disappeared after a while. At one point a baby grand piano just dropped out of nowhere to crash on the stage (I'm pretty sure that was a special prop because dropping a real baby grand piano twenty or thirty feet would probably just go right through the stage). It made an impressive noise, though. And the remnants were somehow used as the continuo for some recitative. I am only able to share the above image because something new at the festival is that, every day of a performance you have a ticket to, they send you an email ahead of time telling you how long the performance will be, as well as some more information. And a photo.

But let me go back a bit--the opera opens with the curtain going up on the interior of what we realize is a church: there is a large crucifix, some large religious paintings and a number of pews facing away from us, toward the crucifix. Before a note of the overture, ghostly figures in white come and remove all the pews, the crucifix and the paintings. Then the overture starts and, believe it or not, a real goat trots across the stage. That I do know the reason for: the goat is an animal associated with the ancient Greek satyr, half-man, half-goat, a solitary creature driven by lust who is the ancestor of the Don Giovanni character.

Quoting from the hefty program booklet:

The reason why Don Giovanni is a dangerous figure is because he strikes at the heart of a symbolic system by replacing Agape by Eros. And Eros--to paraphrase Georges Bataille--is always close bound up with death. Don Giovanni knows neither remorse nor guilt: in order to satisfy his desires he attacks the Law, discrediting and abrogating it. It is not coincidence that his first act in the opera is the killing of a father--the Father.

But I want to talk a bit about what is so compelling about this and other modern opera productions. It is really about creating illusions to intensify the performance. Some of the ones last night included some remarkable images: a line of fire (real fire) suddenly appearing, crossing half the stage (a very large stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus), a scrim dropping down, turning the whole stage area into a ghostly version of itself (this is enhanced by special lighting), oh, and speaking of lighting, there was one moment that I can barely comprehend: Don Giovanni kicks a bunch of stone fragments across the stage and suddenly the lighting changes so that they, and he, appear to be floating on a plane of oil or something unearthly. I have no idea how they did that, but they did and it was eerie to an extreme.

What makes opera so different is that when we see a special effect in a movie, no matter how well it is done, we know it is just a bunch of pixels that came out of a studio in Hollywood. There is nothing real there. But in an opera production, what we see on stage is actually real: that was a real goat, a real naked woman (or dozens of them at one point), those are real singers singing (without any processing or pitch correction), yes, there are stage props, but they are actual material objects, not pixels and the light is actual light. So the whole experience is entirely different. And, well, to me at least, much more interesting.

At the end of the opera the whole cast comes on stage, starting with the hundred or so women extras used in various scenes. By the time we get to the principal singers, there are two hundred people on stage. That plus the nearly one hundred in the orchestra pit starts to give you an idea of just how enormous a production like this is. And I'm not counting any of the backstage technical staff: designers, carpenters, lighting technicians, stagehands and a host of others--costumers! What does a production like this cost? A fortune! Good thing that the primary sponsor of the Salzburg Festival is Audi.

But no, I simply can't give a review, or even a detailed description of what went on--it was four hours long. But I can say that it was masterfully done and the singing and playing was fantastically accomplished. We are living in a golden age of opera production. And Mozart certainly knew what he was doing!