Name: Don Giovanni
Start: 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Großes Festspielhaus

Organization

Costume designer

Romeo Castellucci

Zusammenarbeit Kostüm

Theresa Wilson

itarbeit Regie

Maxi Menja Lehmann

Mitarbeit Bühne

Alessio Valmori

Mitarbeit Licht

Marco Giusti

Singer

Baritone

Davide Luciano

Don Giovanni

Bass

Mika Kares

Commendatore

Soprano

Nadezhda Pavlova

Donna Anna

Tenor

Michael Spyres

Don Ottavio

Federica Lombardi

Donna Elvira

Vito Priante

Leporello

David Steffens

Masetto

Anna Richter

Zerlina

Stage director

Conductor

Teodor Currentzis

Lighting designer

Set designer

Choreographer

Cindy Van Acker

Dramaturge

Piersandra Di Matteo

Christian Arseni

Chorus master

Vitaly Polonsky

Salzburger Festspiele

Others

musicAeterna Choir

Orchestra

musicAeterna Orchestra

Italian

Salzburg

Austria

Großes Festspielhaus

Love, jealousy, and eternal damnation—minus some supporting details, these are the main ingredients of Mozart’s beloved Don Giovanni. Centuries later, the treasures of the Salzburg-born genius continue to light up the hallowed concert halls of his birthplace, this time with a truly exceptional production of Mozart’s diabolical masterpiece at the 2021 Salzburg Festival! The marvelously charismatic Teodor Currentzis, one of the most brilliant maestros of our day, conducts the legendary score, while visionary Romeo Castellucci brings his genius to the Grosses Festspielhaus. Acclaimed baritone Davide Luciano plays the title role with ambivalence and subtlety, self-destructive but brimming with life...

For Romeo Castellucci, approaching Don Giovanni means confronting the ambiguity, complexity and inner imbalance that Mozart bestows on the protagonist of his opera. Vitality and destruction: Castellucci sees a fascination for the figure in this essential ambivalence. Their vitality, which is completely caught up in the moment, is embodied with symbolic conciseness in the “champagne aria” “Fin ch'han dal vino”, which rushes along like mad. It forms the frenetic prelude to a festival that will be open to all and the actual purpose of which Don Giovanni states bluntly: Leporello, his servant and antithetical alter ego, should then be able to add ten names to the list of Giovanni's female conquests. Its existence, dedicated to the pleasure principle, which knows neither rest nor reflection,
Mozart's Don Giovanni was described by Kierkegaard as a spirit of sensual desire, the "flesh incarnate". His life is realized in pure immanence, beyond good and evil. This makes him extremely dangerous. Because for Don Giovanni there are no rules of social coexistence, he recognizes no law - be it the law of morality, law or religion. He rebels against the law of the father. Despite representing a blazing energy that magnetizes and moves those around him, Don Giovanni radically isolates himself from society (not without exploiting his privileged status). He brings confusion, chaos and destruction to all he touches.
The dance at his party should be "without any order", it says in the "Champagne Aria", and Mozart takes Don Giovanni at his word: the overlapping of different dance movements even leads to a momentary collapse in the finale of the first act musical structure.
The original main title of the opera takes on deeper connotations in this sense, for the word "dissoluto", which ostensibly means a dissolute person, lets its etymological origin from "dissolvere" - "(dis)solve" - ​​shine through: Indeed, Don exists Giovanni detached from any attachment to human, let alone higher orders. More than that, he is someone who actively "dissolves," who separates and divides. The introduction to the opera ends — after Don Giovanni's attempt to rape Donna Anna in the dark of night — with the killing of her father, the Commendatore. For the first time, society is turning against the culprit, whom Donna Anna soon identified, with a call for revenge. However, as in Tirso de Molina's Catholic didactic play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, he is "punished" - "punito". which marks the birth of the Don Juan figure in the early 17th century, not by human but by a supernatural power: the commander returned as a statue, the "stone guest". The onset of transcendence will only be disproportionate to those who see Don Giovanni as just the rogue seducer to which Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto tends to reduce him. Mozart, however, opens up abysses, dimensions of the tragic and the anarchic — from the very first moment: the beginning of the overture anticipates the music of the “stone guest”, that dialogue between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni, “through which even the most sober to the limits human imagining, even beyond it, where we see and hear the supernatural” (Eduard Mörike in Mozart on the Journey to Prague).
Romeo Castellucci will develop his production in constant exchange with Teodor Currentzis. The figures around Don Giovanni have to be grasped in their sharply separated characters and musical physiognomies as well as their respective relationship to the protagonist, without denying the comic element of this "dramma giocoso". In the course of the action, Castellucci will charge the neutral scenic space with precise connotations, which he will uncover by digging deep into the work.

Production booklet

Further reading