Ravinia 2022, Issue 4

KYLE FLUBACKER Donna Anna swears vengeance upon Don Giovanni after discovering the death of her father, the Commendatore, by his hand. Rachel Willis-Sørensen made her 2019 Lyric Opera debut in the role and returns as Donna Anna at Ravinia. The “new” Don Giovanni cap- tured the imagination of some of the greatest writers of the next two centuries. The list is long, but its most prominent exponents were Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Søren Kierkegaard at first, to be followed later by Charles Baudelaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Albert Camus. And when they wrote about Don Giovanni, they wrote not about Don Juan Burlador, but as the world had come to know him through Mozart and Da Ponte. This cautionary tale of evil punished, and the infinite complex- ity, richness, and ambiguity of the human soul, inspired each age to see it through its particular lens. As the 19th century gradually lost interest in sin and salvation and reshaped itself, it saw him as a reflection of its own yearnings and search for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust had his quest, it was said, and Don Giovanni his conquest. He was for some an “antihero” who drove himself to self-destruction through his insatiable drives and dragged others along with him. An- other point of view was that the Don was a melancholy protagonist of a self-defined drama, in search of some illusionary antisocial grail of his own making. In each case, the 19th century often contradicted itself but found a use for this story to say something about its own preoccupations. It saw a mirrored image of itself. In the 20th century he was to un- dergo a radically different evaluation under the microscope of psychoanaly- sis. The earlier portrait of a flawed but defiant hero of Romanticism, in all of the ambiguity that image suggests, gave way to a psychopathic criminal. His malignant narcissism exhibited every form of neurosis and pathology imaginable. And so on. Each age—including our own, here at Ravinia on August 11 and 13—sees in him and his story a reflection of its own world view. He now rightfully no longer represents anything good: he is a criminal predator, serial seducer, and rapist. He is an abuser of women and all society, a paradigm of patriarchal privilege. Today we must differentiate between the character of Don Giovanni and the eponymous opera. Mozart and Da Ponte tell a fascinating tale. One searches in vain to find evidence of any sign of Mozart’s sympathy for him. To the contrary, the work coun- tenances neither his essence nor his behavior. A LTHOUGH Mozart’s framework resides in the supernatural and the rendering of divine justice, the abundant freedom with which he and Da Ponte create this theatrical drama has less to do with religious dogma than the infinite variety of the human experience. Don Giovanni and the Commendatore provide the pillars that hold up the edifice that houses all of the other characters. Neither is fully human nor a pure incarnation of abstract principles. They have a human life but are simultaneously symbols, mani- festations of powerful forces, polar antagonists. That the latter is, if not the arbiter, at least the messenger of a divine judge. But who is the real Don Giovanni? Even the birth of his story is myste- rious. Kierkegaard defined him as a theoretical construction. In this view, Don Juan never existed, nor in reality can he. Taken literally, his story seems improbable, if not ludicrous. The sheer number of names in Leporel- lo’s catalog of the Don’s conquests removes it from the world of the real to the realm of fantasy and hyperbole. The exaggerated dimensions of his crimes invite theorizing, polemics, and commentary. His raison d’être is one dimensional: to subvert society through the abuse of women and the profligate exercise of his assumed aris- tocratic birthrights. To try to explain why he does so is, in a way, fruitless: he simply does so. “Motiveless malignity,” Coleridge’s famous description of Iago’s character, RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 1 – AUGUST 14, 2022 82