Don Giovanni | Director's Note

Director’s Note

by Jean Louis Grinda Don Giovanni is in my view the most difficult of all operas to stage. This immense masterpiece offers inexhaustible possibilities; once a particular dramatic approach has been chosen, the greatest difficulty is, as a result, to maintain overall coherence without distractions.

As far as I am concerned, Don Giovanni is and must be what Mozart and his librettist da Ponte wanted it to be: a drama giocoso, a serious comedy. Behind the drama, as harsh as it is — the sexual assault on Donna Anna, the murder of her father, the humiliation of Donna Elvira, etc. — there is the comedy, Don Giovanni’s game, a style that hints that all this is not entirely serious and that behind the plot, there is a smile, the same smile, indeed, that crosses one’s lips when reading a fairy tale or fable. Is it not, moreover, a stroke of genius that Mozart's chose, in the end, to conclude the opera with a moral of the sort that is the traditional ending of all fables? And just beyond this moral, Mozart makes it clear that at bottom, this was all nothing but a game.

So, this production will of course include all the necessary ingredients of serious drama, punctuated by comedy serving, as always, as counterpoint. But in the end, because we have entered a fable that has reached become of the great Western myths, a pirouette will return us to reality, for great myths never die!

Opera Hong Kong Proudly Presents Don Giovanni 17-19 May 2019 Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Center For more details: http://operahongkong.org/don_giovanni/