Maybe you’re like me, and you need a spoiler warning for an opera that premiered in 1787, the same year the U.S. Constitution was written.
If so, you can stop reading now and return to the Editor’s Note next week. I had never seen Don Giovanni — one of Mozart’s masterworks — before attending a performance at Santa Fe Opera last week, and I was pleasantly surprised at the way the opera subverted many ancient tropes of the genre. Yes, there’s an innocent person who gets killed very early in the opera.
But then, for the remainder of the production, you’re actually watching Cosmic Justice play out for the antagonist. Much like in The Marriage of Figaro — penned in 1786, one year before Don Giovanni — Mozart finds a way for the common man to triumph over a wealthy sociopath. The title character’s worldview is telegraphed immediately in the Santa Fe Opera production, which depicts his home as a base monument to ego.
Here, arranged on the wall, are countless iterations of the same portrait of the red-clad nobleman. The set changes several times, and the scenic design by Yannis Thavoris requires cast members to push the walls apart and to spin them into different orientations. Sometimes the walls close in on each other, and sometimes they open to reveal another room.
Don Giovanni, perhaps better known to the audience in concept as Don Juan, is a “ladies’ man” who isn’t interested in showing his conquests a good time. He’s in it for the numbers, as famous.