Hellish play: Cincinnati Opera balances fun and warnings in 'Don Giovanni'

Dinner guest brings Don Giovanni's comeuppance to the table.

Stage directors' practice of setting a scene behind the overture is a practice that sometimes seems intrusive. Whether you know the opera or not, traditionally the audience would become accustomed to just settling in and taking in the overture as an abstract sketch of the action and more pertinent music to come. 

Now for an overture to introduce the raising of an opaque curtain is somewhat old-fashioned: Modern lighting and the use of a scrim can establish a veil of illusion that the words and action blended in the libretto will substantiate and clarify over the hours to follow. The audience immediately shoulders more of a duty than simply to stop chatting and iPhone perusal and to listen; we are interpreting from the first note on.

Accompanying several compelling minutes of music, Alison Moritz presents a mimed scenario in Cincinnati Opera's production of "Don Giovanni," which opened the company's 2024 Summer Festival season Thursday night at Music Hall. We see the title character's narcissism and exploitation of social status before Elliot Madore has sung a word. His dismissal of his latest bedmate and his rough expressions of privilege as he rises and is dressed for the day were quickly embedded in our minds as Dame Jane Glover conducted a vivid account of the overture, the finish of which proved emblematic of her work throughout.

Leporello makes a stern point to his self-involved boss.

Building upon that portrayal in the overture, the aristocrat's predatory nature is supported by his readiness to threaten and overpower any opposition. Lorenzo da Ponte, typically worldly and witty in this libretto (translated and conveyed by sharp supertitles), lets us know that Don Giovanni's charisma is undercut by a habit of exploitation and predation that his servant Leporello is wearily acquainted with and quick to comment upon. In Christian Pursell's performance opening night, he is ready to become caught up in his boss' chicanery and adventurism, but just as likely to be disgusted by it. Don Giovanni's exuberance, consistently given full dimensions by Madore, is only fitfully contagious, and that limitation is fleshed out in the seriousness with which this production takes his victims' lives. 

Even the lighthearted Catalog Aria, with Leporello's hyperbolic account to the jilted Donna Elvira of his boss' incessant sexual triumphs, is treated as involving real women. Moritz has crossing the stage several female passersby casually pointed to as examples of Don Giovanni's tastes in women. They aren't just names and numbers in an overstuffed book, which some productions emphasize by having Leporello display an unfolding volume with the sort of serially attached pages you find in dribble-proof books shared with infants and toddlers.

There are a number of deft touches in the stage action suggesting that the Don's joy in conquest is superficial, hiding a pathology. In the opening scene showing the fatal duel with the Commendatore, the father of a noblewoman whose victimhood he interrupts, the rake is handed a dagger to contest with the Commendatore's rapier. Unequal in weaponry evidently, but then the dagger has a phallic symbolism superior to the sword's. The Commendatore is killed with it, setting up the scene of supernatural revenge at the end: There will be hell to pay for Giovanni's priapic energy. 

The Don is incapable of true intimacy. Moritz cunningly stages "La ci darem," the duet through which Don attempts to seduce the peasant bride Zerlina, as a push-pull of closeness and social distance designed to attract a woman who is at bottom devoted to her fiance Masetto. That role was sung by Joseph Parrish with an uneasy mixture of possessive self-esteem and the subservience his social position demands. 

Giovanni seems to enjoy such challenges, but it's also clear he cannot help himself. His lovely serenade to Elvira's maid, a personage never seen in the libretto, is accompanied by a dancer who's represented as a figure of the Don's fantasy. The show's real characters sap much of the main character's personhood, which he is incapable of realizing with any moral stature. As Moritz says in her program note: "Rather than being the focal point of the story, he [becomes] a catalyst for the stories of the six people around him." 

Donna Elvira feels the Don's betrayal.

That those stories deserve their final triumph is explicit in the opera's epilogue, with its moral tag underlined in an ensemble involving three women and three men. The only person not paired off at the end is the jilted Donna Elvira, a role sung with ample poignancy and somewhat taxed coloratura by Jessica Rivera. (Why the character's announcement that she plans to enter a convent was received as a laugh line Friday is a puzzle to me, but let that be.)  

What is clear is that with the Don's supernatural dispatch to the infernal regions, engineered by the animated statue of the martyred Commendatore, justice has been restored. The essential task of stage comedy, to produce a happy ending, is accomplished believably as the brimstone glows in the background: The cynical jokes and mockery have been left behind, leaving their own glow to warm the basic humanity of the other characters.

More about the singing now, starting with the Commendatore: From Patrick Guetti's first phrases, as Donna Anna's father confronts the masked Giovanni, I knew that seeing and hearing him in ghastly gray makeup and garb as the Stone Guest in the climactic scene would be an authentic thrill: he's a basso of genuine authority, with  vocal and physical stature to match. His performance as a believable agent of divine retribution was beyond anything I could have imagined.

As Giovanni and Leporello, Madore and Pursell are well-matched vocally as well as dramatically.  Moritz has wisely avoided the "high-concept" trick of seeing them as two sides of the same character, and the singers' portrayals maintained the distinction as well as the comedy of their pretending to be each other when the peril increases and Giovanni is trying to add to his score.  (So canny is the stage direction that for a moment, I thought that Madore's difficulty putting his trailing cloak back on after the Don and Leporello shed their disguises was intentional, but have decided that the difficulty was accidental, and that the intricacy of planned action and singing duties kept Pursell from lending a hand. For the rest of the scene, Madore draped the cloak over one arm.)

Masked in pursuit of villainy: Donna Anna and Don Ottavio

Musical and stage direction regularly complemented each other. Donna Anna, in "Non mi dir," explains that her reserve in her devoted betrothal to Don Ottavio is more a factor of her grief for her father than any lapse in love. Jessica Faselt's superbly sustained lyricism, evident in earlier scenes as well, was enlivened by  her passionate investment in a character who inevitably puts her lover in the shadow of exemplary indignation on her behalf. Nonetheless, the tenor's showcase aria "Il mio tesoro intanto" was interpreted to the hilt of its storied popularity by Aaron Blake. 

"Batti, batti, o bel Masetto," as sung with pert suavity by Erin Keesy, was far from an attempt at masochistic appeasement, but rather sparkled in gestures of flirtation and ardor that must have lain behind the attraction that led the peasant couple to marriage. After Masetto has suffered Giovanni's assault, her later song of comfort ("Vedrai, carino") was staged  and sung with such steady attention to Mozart's tender phrases that it became one of the show's most moving episodes. Among the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's fine contributions under Glover's direction was its accompaniment here. 

Zerlina and Masetto have issues to overcome.

The director's handling of chorus master Henri Venanzi's singers and several unvoiced supernumeraries hewed to the same relevant dramatic standard established by the named characters. It was well supplemented by Yoshihisa Arai's choreography and Philip Witcomb's occasionally surrealistic costume design. The four attendant ghosts in the climactic scene are an indelible part of my memories of this superlative production. 

But the meaning of "Don Giovanni" comes down on the side of genuine human relationships and the delights and sufferings they involve, especially as clad in such musical glory. Don Giovanni is an outlier in his own world. Given that apartness, it's amazing that such a figure generates an opera held by many to be the greatest ever. 

[Photos by Philip Groshong/Cincinnati Opera]