Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Don Giovanni
LIVE IN HD
Overview
Tony Award–winning director of Broadway’s A View from the Bridge and West Side Story, Ivo van Hove makes a major Met debut with a new take on Mozart’s tragicomedy, re-setting the familiar tale of deceit and damnation in an abstract architectural landscape and shining a light into the dark corners of the story and its characters. Maestro Nathalie Stutzmann makes her Met debut conducting a star-studded cast led by baritone Peter Mattei as a magnetic Don Giovanni, alongside the Leporello of bass-baritone Adam Plachetka. Sopranos Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, and Ying Fang make a superlative trio as Giovanni’s conquests—Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina—and tenor Ben Bliss is Don Ottavio. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
English StreamText captioning is available for the Met’s transmission of Don Giovanni here. A transcript of the transmission will also be available to view after the live performance.
Buy tickets for Don Giovanni live in the opera house here.
A co-production of the Metropolitan Opera and Opéra National de Paris
Production a gift of Rolex
Additional funding from The Walter and Leonore Annenberg Endowment Fund, Marina Kellen French, Linda Hirshman, the Estate of Michael L. Tapper, M.D., and an anonymous donor
World premiere: National Theater (now Estates Theater), Prague, 1787. Aided by his ingenious librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart approached his operatic retelling of the Don Juan myth from a point of view that is neither tragic nor entirely comic, but rather lighthearted, urbane, and ironic. We follow the title character and his earthy comic sidekick, Leporello, through a series of encounters that begins with a fatal duel, moves back and forth between the humorous and the sentimental, and ends with the protagonist being dragged down to hell.
Creators
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was the son of a Salzburg court musician who exhibited him as a musical prodigy throughout Europe. His achievements in opera, in terms of beauty, vocal challenge, and dramatic insight, remain unsurpassed. Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), who led an adventurous life in Venice and Vienna, also collaborated with Mozart on Le Nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte. He later emigrated to America, where he served as the first professor of Italian at New York’s Columbia College (now University).
PRODUCTION
Ivo van Hove
Set and Lighting Designer
Jan Versweyveld
Costume Designer
An D’Huys
Projection Designer
Christopher Ash
Choreographer
Sara Erde
Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Music
Mozart’s score for this opera teems with the elegance and grace that marks his entire output, which is already evident in the ravishing overture. This musical refinement is combined with extraordinary dramatic expression. Don Giovanni’s famous Champagne Aria is exhilarating but almost vulgar, while the ineffectual loveliness of the tenor Don Ottavio is depicted in the long, languid lines of the character’s two ravishing solos, “Dalla sua pace” and “Il mio tesoro.” Donna Anna’s nobility are well reflected in her major arias. The buffoonish (yet astute) Leporello is funny throughout the opera, but his Act I Catalog Aria is also a towering example of the melding of words and music.
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