Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first of eight performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 opera Don Giovanni, given the subtitle Il dissoluto punito (the libertine punished). This marked the conclusion of Director Michael Cavanagh’s “trilogy” production, in which all three of the operas that Mozart composed for libretto texts by Lorenzo da Ponte were situated in a common setting, each in a different historical period. As I observed when this project was first announced, that setting was “a moderately grand house in the Early American style, perhaps along the lines of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.”
The project began in October of 2019 with the performance of The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492). The historical period was the early years of the newly-constituted United States of America, and one did not have to stretch the imagination too far to see Jefferson himself as Count Almaviva and Sally Hemings as Susanna. Due to the COVID pandemic, the second opera in the cycle, the K. 588 Così fan tutte (thus do all women) was not performed until this past November. The house had been transformed into the Wolfbridge Country Club, and the historical period was the Thirties. The overall context involved the diversions of the leisure class at a time when most of the American population was suffering under the Great Depression.
Cavanagh’s staging of K. 527 is set in a post-apocalyptic future, and the house is now in ruins. Nevertheless, the title character (Canadian baritone Etienne Dupuis, making his SFO debut) seems to have made the place livable with enough servants to see to his everyday needs. On the other hand, while both K. 492 and K. 588 could be presented with a single set, the K. 527 narrative is literally “all over the map.” Giovanni is too busy building up his list of sexual conquests to spend very much time at home; and Erhard Rom, responsible for sets and projections, had an abundance of imaginative tricks up his sleeve to establish a rich sequence of scene changes.
What may be most interesting about this new production is the way in which it complements both K. 492 and K. 588 in its approach to sexual politics. Almaviva inhabits the same “man’s world” as Jefferson; and, while Susanna is far cleverer than her husband-to-be Figaro, her skills are far more evident to the Countess Almaviva than they are to the Count. Similarly, while the female members of the Wolfbridge Country Club enjoy any number of benefits and luxuries, the only exception to the premise that “the men are in charge” comes from the servant Despina, who is basically Susanna a little over a century later.
If, in our own generation, women have come into their own as equal partners in the “social contract,” it is clear that all of those advances have been rolled back in the future of K. 527. Indeed, the women in the cast simply reflect three different aspects of Giovanni’s conquests; and none of them have a fraction of the cleverness we have observed in both Susanna and Despina. As I observed in previewing this opera, the underlying narrative involves Giovanni’s encounters with past, present, and future “conquests.”
Don Giovanni (Etienne Dupuis) being consumed by the fires of Hell (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)
The past is Donna Elvira (soprano Nicole Car, making her SFO debut). The present is Donna Anna (soprano Adela Zaharia, also making her SFO debut). The future is Zerlina (soprano Christina Gansch). However, it is probably worth observing that Giovanni’s designs on both Anna and Zerlina are never consummated, no matter how many entries there are in the list of conquests complied by Giovanni’s servant Leporello (bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni). The fact is that the narrative begins with a frustrated effort to add to that list; and things go steadily downhill from there (“downhill” meaning that, by the end of the opera, the Don has been dragged down to Hell).
Taken as a whole, Cavanagh’s approach to staging Mozart has left us with a fascinating perspective on sexual politics. Mind you, that is a concept that would have surprised (if not muddled) both da Ponte and Mozart. However, Cavanagh clearly wanted to conceive a triptych for our “immediate present.” It was more than a little ironic that his venture into a dysfunctional culture should have been postponed due to a dysfunctional present. Just as ironic is that the very concept of “a woman’s place,” which provided the “spinal cord” of the triptych’s narratives, is currently facing the prospect of a Supreme Court rollback of a major decision that advanced the cause of women’s rights.
Whether by design or by chance, Cavanagh has brought Mozart into the present day with more than a few motivations for reflection.
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