The opera novice: Mozart's Don Giovanni, opera’s Jimmy Savile

We're always curious about the sexually powerful but Mozart's Don Giovanni is no manual for seduction, says Sameer Rahim.

Iain Paterson as Don Giovanni and Darren Jeffrey as Leporello in the ENO's Don Giovanni.
Iain Paterson as Don Giovanni and Darren Jeffrey as Leporello in the ENO's Don Giovanni. Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

Don Giovanni was the first opera I ever tried listening to properly. I borrowed a CD from my local library – the Carlo Maria Giulini recording, with Eberhard Wächter, Joan Sutherland and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – and tried following along with the libretto. What attracted me wasn’t the stellar cast – I hadn’t heard of them – or even Mozart’s music but the promise of a tale of ribaldry and seduction. Many teenage boys, and more mature audiences of both sexes, are naturally curious about how in hell Don Giovanni managed to get so many women. I know I was.

Being a teenager I also got distracted and didn’t listen all the way to the end. Frankly, as a manual for getting girls it wasn’t much use. My curiosity was rekindled last week when I went to ENO’s production of Mozart’s opera. This time it was the music I was interested in, especially, the dark, pulsing overture that sounded so different from the other Mozart operas I’d heard.

One scene I remember finding very funny as a teenager was the famous “list”, when Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello catalogues his master’s worldwide conquests – “In Italy, 640. In Germany, 231. In France, 100. In Turkey, 91”, etc.

In Rufus Norris’s modern-dress production, revived from 2010, the list scene’s tone was flippant and disturbing. Leporello (Darren Jeffrey) is a seedy photographer who snaps his master’s women and arranges them into a “spreadsheet” (one of many cheesy jokes in Jeremy Sams’s demotic translation) projected on screen. It looked a bit like Bluebeard’s Facebook page: reams of photos of Swedish au pairs, who got a laugh, and young schoolgirls, who most certainly didn't. Don Giovanni’s attraction is his cheeky glamour, sure, but isn’t that what people said about Jimmy Savile?

What makes it worse is that Leporello is singing to Donna Elvira, a woman ruined by the Don (here played Iain Paterson). She, along with Donna Anna, who only just escapes being raped by DG in the opening scene and whose father he murders, are the moral characters. But though they’re victims the two Donnas are whiny and unforgiving. (“I hear only the voice of vengeance, of rage and hate,” sings Donna Elvira) and Don Giovanni, although definitely a Bad Man, is compelling whenever he comes on stage. The opera reminded me of reading Richardson’s Clarissa, impatiently waiting for the virtuous characters to shut up so we could get back to the irrepressible Lovelace – another rapist, incidentally.

Don Giovanni seduces the audience in his duet with Zerlina, a country girl he wants to steal from her fiancé. (The Don: “There you’ll give me your hand; Zerlina: I want to and yet I don’t.”) When he sings that his only misfortune is “a good heart”, loving so powerfully that he cannot restrict himself to one woman, we’d like to believe him. There are reports that the librettist Da Ponte had help from Casanova himself in creating the story. “Be still, my unjust heart,” sings Donna Elvira, “To pity him is a sin.” Yet she does, and we do, because wouldn’t we rather be with the flawed and fun loving than the priggish?

My opera-companion was less sympathetic. The women who keep falling for him were simply “stupid”, she said. She had a point. “Search every street, Look for more girls. Whatever you meet, Just bring to the feast,” sings DG. He treats the girls like food, easily consumed and forgotten about until desire returns. In this production the dinner to which Donna Anna’s father’s ghost – the Commendatore – is invited is not lavish, but a tawdry picnic where the Don throws food round in dissatisfaction.

When the ghost appears the dark music of the overture returns. As it was staged here it was unclear that it was the Commendatore’s statue coming to life; he seemed more like Banquo with a rubbish bag over his head. Still nothing could still the scene’s blazing power. Matthew Best as the ghost pointedly tells Don Giovanni that he will not dine; he only needs “celestial food”. He urges him to repent and when DG remains defiant, he is dragged to Hell.

I don’t think I’ve seen a more frightening scene in opera. We all secretly fear the moment when our bad behaviour will be exposed and we are punished. Perhaps we all secretly desire it also, behaving recklessly until someone cares enough to make us stop. Don Giovanni is defiant not only through stubbornness but also because he can’t resist the lurid sensation of the flames: Heaven would be too boring.

Is that the secret to the opera’s weird changes of register? Maybe Mozart was musically inspired most by sin and punishment. He might pay lip service to repentance and forgiveness, but they don’t get his juices flowing.

Don Giovanni is at ENO until November 17