Don Giovanni - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Don Giovanni

musical direction
Philippe Jordan
Staging
Barrie Kosky
Stage & costumes
Katrin Lea day
light
Franck Evin
Don Giovanni
Kyle Ketelsen
Commander
Ain Anger
Donna Anna
Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Don Ottavio
Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Donna Elvira
Kate Lindsey
Leporello
Philippe Sly
Masetto
Peter waiter

Don Juan is a figure who crosses boundaries: the boundary between the sexes, the boundary between classes and the boundary between life and death, because he does not stop at the walls of the cemetery. He is said to have already loved 2065 women, 1003 in Spain alone, 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany and 100 in France. But he did not only poach in the Christian West: 91 in Turkey (his servant keeps a precise record of this). He has been active in European literatures since the Counter-Reformation, when around 1620 a Spanish monk recorded his legend in the comedia The Mocker of Seville and the Stone Guest. He quickly penetrated the game templates of the Italian Commedia dell’arte as well as the classic French comedy. Mozart and da Ponte gave him his most powerful form in Prague: there, in 1787, their opera Don Giovanni or The Punished Wüstling premiered. The simultaneity of elements of farce, comic and tragic opera, of low and high style, symphonic and sacred music leads into new frontier territory up to the rhythmic cacophony of the 1st act finale, in which three dance bands play at the same time, and to passages, in which the chromaticism is driven into twelve-tone structures. Giovanni is on the move between all these languages, he himself has no music of his own, since he makes himself the projection surface for the women he desires: Donna Anna, raised in strict fatherly care, who seeks adventure in him; the escaped Donna Elvira, who hopes for emotional stability; of the lower-class girl Zerlina, who dreams of social advancement in her arms. The opera's labyrinthine sequence of scenes is bracketed by Giovanni's murder of Donna Anna's father and the return of the dead as a "stone guest". In the Catholic Comedia, when Giovanni felt his end was approaching, he begged in vain to be allowed to confess. In the opera it is the stone guest who wants to save the rebel from eternal damnation by imploring him to repent after all - which he refuses. So, despite the fall from hell, it remains questionable who is the loser in this duel, because Giovanni's intellectual defiance is unbroken. With this new production, the Vienna State Opera is starting a Mozart-Da Ponte cycle under the direction of its musical director Philippe Jordan and directed by Barrie Kosky.

Subject to changes.

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