The great operas can be interpreted and reinterpreted endlessly without ever losing their freshness and power, and they therefore provide directors and artists with rich opportunities. Francesca Zambello's funny, fast-paced, exhilarating Don Giovanni is a remarkable illustration of this fact. Given a cast of this quality, outstanding staging opportunities, and a director of Zambello's genius, and Don Giovanni feels as if it is bursting on the world for the first time all over again.
      This production is a gem of what I cannot but persist in calling the new opera - the genuinely theatrical opera with excellent singers who look and can act the part properly, such a far cry from the voice-alone based opera of the past, where hefty middle-aged artistes stood rooted to the stage and belted out the roles of youthful lovers. A great deal has changed in opera because of what the possibilities of real theatricality add to the music, and this is what directors like Zambello have taken up and applied with relish.
      And the depth of outstanding talent that the last few decades of voice and acting training has nurtured is evidenced in the fact that every single role in this production is performed at top star quality. Simon Keenlyside is a rumbustious and irresponsible Don, Kyle Ketelson a very funny Leporello, Joyce DiDonato a superbly angry, hurt and still-besotted Donna Elvira, Miah Persson a delicious Zerlina, Marina Poplavskaya a stately, grieving, vengeful Donna Anna, and Ramon Vargas rescues Don Ottavio from being an ineffectual posturer and finds the dignity in his hesitating mixture of supportiveness and desire. Each role has been thought out and sharply realised by director and respective performer, and jointly make a convincing whole.
      There is an absorbing debate about what Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart meant by their portrayal of Don Giovanni. Is he an Enlightenment hero, defying traditional religious morality even as the flames of hell engulf him, living a life of pleasure on ‘libertine' principles as these were understood by the members of the Hellfire Club and the philosophes of the Age of Reason? Or is this wonderful work an essay in conventional morality, in which dissolution merits its punishment, and is a lesson to us all?
      It is hard to believe that Mozart and da Ponte avoided irony and sincerely wished to reinforce ethical clichés. Neither this work nor Mozart's other operas leave one feeling that the surface meaning exhausts all its meaning. On one level, certainly, the conventions of morality are fulsomely observed: Don Giovanni recklessly pursues sexual adventure, even to the point of killing the father of someone he has tried to rape: and surely, for this alone, he deserves in eighteenth century terms to be dragged to eternal torment. He drives a coach and horses not only through moral and sexual conventions, but social ones; the women he pursues are from every class - a different sort of crime in its day. He makes and breaks promises carelessly, he bullies, he is oblivious to everything but his own enjoyment - and that in particular includes being oblivious to the pain and distress of those he hurts.
      But the other side of the picture has Don Giovanni as a democrat, a lover of life, an embracer of the pleasures of sense, an independent spirit, and a brave, frank, audacious spurner of convention. The music and the drama together offer these ambiguities, even if a government censor of Mozart's own day could find nothing specific to complain about, even if he sensed that he should be uneasy about the message overall: the overtones would plague him, though the note seem true to the key required.
Francesca Zambello has taken the subtitle - Il dissoluto punito - as her text, and made this unequivocally a story of a bad man and his rightfully bad end. There is no disguising the fact that the Don's clumsy and generally fruitless efforts at seduction - hardly seduction: they are mostly attempted rapes - and his disregard for the interests and feelings of others make us sympathise with the angry adversaries he collects in increasing numbers as the story unfolds. And then there is that denouement, when the Commendatore has him in an icy grip, and the flames shoot up all round him: whose side are we on then, even in Zambello's judicial rendering? Such is the question a great work of art asks: all the more acutely for being posed in such a great production.
AC Grayling