The deadly reckoning in Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” awaits the perfection of toxic masculinity. Greetings from Harvey Weinstein, 235 years ago. The original list of characters in the opera simply calls the protagonist “a young, extraordinarily extravagant cavalier”. Baritone Michael Volle, the authentic Hans Sachs of “Meistersinger”, could hardly live up to that. He and director Vincent Huguet present the most unscrupulous seducer of women in world history not triumphantly uninhibited, cheeky, lustfully cynical, but rather sluggish, hesitant, deeply disturbed. In this way they promote the lack of tension in the performance, which is paved with scenic inconsistencies.
With the Frenchman Huguet Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera completed his project for an Italian “Mozart Trilogy” which was not conceived in this way. The plan to realize the three operas composed to libretti by the brilliant poet Lorenzo Da Ponte as a whole: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Così fan tutte” have already appeared in colour. As always, Daniel Barenboim, who will be 80 at the end of the year, demands the strictest discipline from himself in order to maintain his artistic high-flying thirst for action. At his Easter festival now, the Berlin “Festtage” (until April 17), he is constantly at the opera or concert podium.
Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” is the drama of the unscrupulous machinery of seduction. Why is there a fascination? Her evil hero and Mozart’s soulful music virtuously transform the moral morass into its opposite, into the masculine vitality and the intoxicating brilliance of a seductive hero who can’t show off here. His victims are stronger, more defensive. “Let go of women?” Giovanni scoffs at his buddy Leporello’s suggestion, “they are as necessary to me as the bread I eat, the air I breathe.” He must love everyone, because “he who is faithful to only one is cruel to the others”. Sings the monster of love and women that fail him.
What are Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy doing in this performance?
Mozart, the feminist of his century, loved women, he brings them to the forefront in all his operas, fires their defensive power, empowers them to resist men with subversive cunning and finesse. Three loving women rise up against Giovanni, the murderer of Donna Anna’s father: Slávka Zámecniková as the flaming, revenge-thirsty daughter, Elsa Dreisig as the truly loving Donna Elvira with a blazing soprano voice, Serena Sáenz as the seduced bride, as bright as a bell. The powerful-voiced trio is counterpointed by Riccardo Fassi as the casual Leporello, by Bogdan Volkov as Don Ottavio, who is standing there whining, and David Oštrek as the supporting character Masetto. Daniel Barenboim allows all the beautiful details to become clear in the sound of the Staatskapelle, but his extremely stretched tempos can rarely create the musical tension.
Vincent Huguet worked with Patrice Chereau, but he replaced his farsightedness in thinking and pictorial clarity in Aurélie Maestre’s gray stage with fretwork panels with crude, ambitious directing ideas. Don Giovanni has become a photographer, and at the beginning Huguet shows a historical photo of a politician on the monitor: Angela Merkel close to Nicolas Sarkozy – what’s the point? Present, of course, laptop and mobile phone, absent-mindedly Giovanni’s champagne aria, gives away the crumbled cemetery scene, the final hangman’s meal, prosaically cold Giovanni’s death: the Commander (Peter Rose) takes his revenge lying in state in the coffin, then sings the verdict as an official criminal judge. Giovanni is administered the lethal injection by white coats, after which he can watch his own conclusion as Michael Volle bored at the edge of the stage. It remains unclear from the interpretation, which is basically inexperienced, why such a faintly exposed masculinity should fascinate women at all.