Tomorrow’s offering on radio klassik Stephansdom‘s Opernabend will be Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Thomas Allen in the title role, Simone Alaimo as his sidekick/henchman Leporello, and Karita Mattila as Donna Elvira, in a 1991 recording performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner.
Certainly among the most highly regarded operas ever composed, Don Giovanni demonstrates to me the extraordinary intellectual and emotional range of the Classical period, a range usually accorded to the music of the Romantic era. The aesthetic restrictions of the Classical period, borrowing something from the Baroque, encouraged a demanding focus of expression often dissipated by the wild emotional, subjective imaginings of the Romantics, Beethoven excepted (Beethoven always excepted from generalizations like this). Don Giovanni ranges from the comic, leering, lascivious skirt-chasing of its title character in Act One to a vision of the jaws of Hell at its conclusion, which is to say that it contains just about everything from sex to death. As such, it’s had an impact on musicians and philosophers ever since its 1787 premiere in Prague, conducted by the composer himself. Flaubert called Don Giovanni one of “the three finest things God ever made” (it was in good company; Hamlet and the sea made up the remainder of the trio), and a discussion of the opera introduces the central ideas behind Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.
Whether Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute (or any other of his operas) is Mozart’s best is a matter for cocktail party sniping, but it certainly ranks up there, and therefore ranks as one of the best of all operas. radio klassik Stephansdom airs Don Giovanni tomorrow, Saturday, October 3, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; you can stream it here. Barrie Kosky’s insightful production for the Wiener Staatsoper, which some will no doubt find rather grim but which I find rather wonderful, is available at Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ platform; the trailer for the Vienna production is below.
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