Each age sees its concerns reflected in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, more acutely, perhaps, than in any other opera. “Once a figure of rebellion against conventions,” director Mariame Clément writes in a recent Guardian article, “he has come to embody what many rebel against today. In today’s world,” she adds, “many people would consider Giovanni himself a patriarchal figure whose statue they would gladly topple.” And indeed the first thing we see in her new Glyndebourne production is video footage of his statue being hauled to the ground as Leporello looks on.
What follows, however, is altogether more uncertain. Clément acknowledges that this most complex of operas admits a multiplicity of interpretations, and she is often far from simplistic in her approach to its ironies and ambiguities. But what she offers can also be anodyne and fussy, at odds on occasion with the sensuality and demonic fire we find in the score, despite the belching flames that here accompany Giovanni’s eventual descent to hell.
