[Met Performance] CID:322020



Don Giovanni
Metropolitan Opera House, Wed, October 4, 1995




Don Giovanni (435)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Lorenzo Da Ponte
Don Giovanni
Thomas Hampson

Donna Anna
Carolyn James

Don Ottavio
Frank Lopardo

Donna Elvira
Patricia Schuman

Leporello
Bryn Terfel

Zerlina
Hei-Kyung Hong

Masetto
Herbert Perry

Commendatore
Sergei Koptchak


Conductor
James Levine


Production
Franco Zeffirelli

Costume Designer
Anna Anni

Lighting Designer
Gil Wechsler

Choreographer
Norbert Vesak

Stage Director
Lesley Koenig





Don Giovanni received ten performances this season.

Review 1:

Justin Davidson in Newsday
The Cassanova as Hero
Mozart?s proud, thrilling ?Don Giovanni?

?Don Giovanni," which received a bejeweled season premiere on Wednesday, is about a proud and almost tragic cad, a sexual harasser of heroic proportions: This is an opera Robert Packwood could love. Like the formerly distinguished senator from Oregon, Don Giovanni is a mostly ineffectual womanizer ? despite a list of past conquests the size of a telephone directory, he is always stymied in the opera itself ? and his techniques of seduction involve plenty of yanking and groping.


Nowadays, of course, he would be considered a pathetic slob, unworthy of being played and sung by the regal Thomas Hampson, undeserving even of such glorious retribution as being dragged to the underworld by an avenging statue, accompanied by a chorus of demons. Today such gross machismo is considered merely sordid, and its perpetrators are fired, run off campus, ignominiously hustled out of office or required to seek therapy. No throbbing minor chords of Mozart for them.


Why, then, is Don Giovanni still such a sympathetic creep?


Part of the answer is that the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, could probably identify with his main character, and consequently treated him as magnanimously as the moral imperatives of the day allowed him to. Da Ponte skipped around Europe, always one step ahead of his reputation, and when that continent got too hot for him, he lit out for that last refuge of the libertine: New York City. (Da Ponte was also friendly with Giacomo Casanova, who, it is just possible, may have consulted on the libretto. Now those would have been story conferences worth sitting in on!)


But the character of Don Giovanni also has Mozart on his side: While Don Ottavio and Donna Anna, the moral consciences of the opera, are tiresome and sanctimonious, the numbers that feature Don Giovanni are ebullient and irresistible, Even the orchestra lends a hand in the seduction of Zerlina in "La ci darem la mano," rushing along encouragingly with Don Giovanni's entreaties, then pulling artfully back to allow the peasant girl to make up her mind.


And at the end of so much jocularity, the music that heralds Don Giovanni's demise, with its apocalyptic trombones and lugubrious swells, is as tragic as any Mozart wrote. There is something thrilling about watching Don Giovanni, staunch in his hedonism right to the end, being ushered out by such a wonderful score. The message of the plot is that the wages of sin is death; the message of the music is that sin is worth it.


Besides, in this production, at least, one cannot help but liking Hampson, whose partnership with Bryn Terfel as Leporello makes for some comic teamwork on the order of Laurel and Hardy. Hampson and Terfel have two of the finest voices in the business, and hearing them together was a privilege.


The performance, even without Sharon Sweet, who was ill, was vocally impeccable: Carolyn James added her vocal virtues to Donna Anna's moral ones; Hei Kyung Hong was agile, coquettish and sweet as Zerlina; Herbert Perry hammed it up charmingly as Masetto; Patricia Schuman was deliciously unhinged as Donna Elvira; Frank Lopardo captured Don Ottavio's lyrical wimpiness, and Sergei Koptchak was fearsome as the Commendatore.



Search by season: 1995-96

Search by title: Don Giovanni,



Met careers