Don Giovanni

Of the two operas I've now seen live (surely enough of a sample to make me an aficionado!), I can say that Don Giovanni is easily superior to Manon Lescaut.

In saying that, I'm not judging between them musically. The fact, though, is that with Manon, one has to forgive the absurdity of the libretto, excusing it on behalf of the music. With Don Giovanni, the libretto, the drama, stands securely on its own two feet. The actors could speak instead of singing these parts and the resulting play -- while hardly the same! -- would be worthy of an evening.

So, with all due reverence to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, let us also pay a little homage to his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, an engraving of whom I've uploaded here. This wasn't their first collaboration. Da Ponte had worked with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro.

With Don Giovanni, Da Ponte was working from the traditional materials regarding the Spanish rake "Don Juan," of course, but he added as much as he received.

The gist of the legend is this: a libertine rogue kills the father of a girl he has either seduced or attempted to rape. He later encounters the graveyard statue of the dead father and jovially invites the deceased to dine with him that night. The ghost or animated statue accepts the invitation, comes to dinner, and drags the Don away to hell.

The immediate precursor of the Mozart/Da Ponte work, in the development of these materials, was a one-act opera by Gazzaniga and Bertati, called Don Giovanni Tenorio. This brief work (designed to be half of a double bill) premiered in Venice in February 1787. The two-act Mozart/Da Ponte work premiered in Prague in October of the same year.

The story would continue to inspire great artists -- Byron comes to mind:

I want a hero, an uncommon want, when every year and month sends forth a new one
Til after cloying the gazettes with cant, the age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I could not care to vaunt, I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan.

I've rattled on quite enough for another entry, yet I still haven't said anything specific to the performance of Don Giovanni in Lincoln Center on Saturday, December 13, 2008. You'll have to wait one more day for that, I fear.

Once around, four acts

I did make it to the Met yesterday.

I was a little taken aback by the one-scene nature of each of the four acts of the opera. I'm more accustomed to the sort of drama that is divided both into acts and into scenes, the difference tactically being just that a change of scenes leaves less time between curtain down and curtain up than does a change of acts!

But in an opera, or at least this one, each act obeys within itself the classical unities of time, place, action. Though there are narrative gaps (huge ones) between them.

I was also surprised by the fact that the cast of each act came out to take a bow after the curtain closed on that one, rather than simply saving the curtain calls for the whole cast for the end. Well, conventions are what they are.

I won't speak of Manon Lescaut as an opera, beyond the little bit of canned-erudition I included in yesterday's entry here. Beyond that, I'll link you to a synopsis.

I will say, though, that I love seeing "understudy" slips in a program, especially with regard to the leading roles. It means some one is getting a break -- a chance to star for which he/she had prepared without any firm expectation -- without even perhaps daring to hope (since that would mean hoping for the illness of a lead, and who could do that?).

At the performance last night, Maria Gavrilova sang the title role, replacing Karita Mattila.

Richard Bernstein also fell ill. He had been singing the role of the captain of the ship that transports prisoners from France to Louisiana. That role fell last night to Keith Miller.

I can't say that the role of the Captain stood out for me. But Manon of course did! and I can say that Ms Gavrilova has a wonderful voice -- and that it's hard to imagine her performance being bettered. The crucial business in which she taunts her older lover with a mirror came off especially well, I think.

I don't see myself becoming an aficionado but I'm glad I went. Even the detour through the streets of the borough of Queens on the way home was instructive.

Puccini

I'll be travelling to NYC later today, to see a performance of Manon Lescaut in the evening.

Manon was the third opera composed by Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (now THERE's a name) -- and the first of his to make a big splash at the time, or become a regular in the canon since.

So indulge me while I reflect on Puccini. What about those first two operas, the ones that preceded his fame? The first was Le Villi (1884), about forest spirits or faeries. The second Edgar (1889), about a young man of that name struggling to choose between his chaste home town girlfriend and an exotic gypsy. The two female participants in the triangle are named Fidelia and Tigrana respectively. Now there's an unsubtle bit of naming.

Manon came along in 1893. One fascinating fact about this opera to a wordsmith like myself: it had five librettists. The publisher (Giulio Ricordi) also contributed to the libretto, as did Puccini himself. None of their seven names appear on the title page of the original score.

Puccini wrote nine operas thereafter: including such repertoire pillars as Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot. Turandot was his final work, left incomplete at his death in November 1924.

There was, one might say, an operatic quality to Puccini's life. In 1909, his wife accused their maid of having an affair with him. The maid subsequently committed suicide, and her family sued the Puccinis. In an opera, of course, there would have been a duel, not a lawsuit. Still, it seems an appropriate scandal.