What to do with Don Giovanni? The title character—not to mention the universally recognized operatic masterpiece that bears his name—should, by rights, have been cancelled in the wake of #MeToo and probably long before.
Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, took holy orders and a mistress as a young man. While a priest, he lived in a brothel in Venice and was banished from the city. The three texts he supplied for Mozart in the last five years of the composer’s short life are held by many to be the greatest literary contributions to opera across the five centuries of this curious, compelling form of entertainment.
Da Ponte can, by those so inclined, be summarily judged guilty by his actions and his associations. The most notorious womanizer of his age, Casanova was a friend and not coincidentally shared many attributes with Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, not least the colossal number of “conquests.” These are cataloged by the nobleman’s manservant, Leporello, in one of the work’s most famous arias:
In Italy, six hundred and forty;
in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;
a hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one.
Leporello also goes into the details of his employer’s omnivorous tastes in women. These range across all physical types, classes, and ages. The catalogue aria is delivered by Leporello to a vengeance-seeking Spanish noblewoman (Donna Elvira) who’s already on the list.
Program books offer no trigger warnings, the supertitles no footnotes to Jeffrey Epstein, when Leporello sings that his boss
… seduces the old ones
for the pleasure of adding to the list.
His greatest favorite
is the young beginner.
The Italian phrase used by Da Ponte here, one normally translated into English as “seduce,” is “fa conquista.” Conquest is a violent act.
Music historian Richard Will’s essential 2022 book, Don Giovanni Captured: Performance, Media, Myth, surveys a diverse swath of stagings and recordings that increasingly trend toward portraying Don Giovanni as a predator and his “conquests” as victims. Even though Will is not now in Berlin, he is able to attend to the production currently at the State Opera (Staatsoper), directed by Claus Guth. This version of the opera it is a revival of his staging for the 2008 Salzburg Festival that first came to the Staatsoper Berlin in 2012.
Guth sets the action in a revolving pine forest. Sometimes a bus stop wheels into view. It becomes the site of various evasions and attacks.
The bleak woodland landscape becomes an unsubtle metaphor for Don Giovanni’s own lostness. His scrappy outfit is neither that of an aristocrat nor a REI-grade hiker, but a nondescript down-and-outer.
The Don’s sidekick, Leporello, looks like Eminem who’s strayed a long, long way from 8 Mile. His hoodie proves useful in disguising him when things get increasingly sticky for his employer after his addictive lusts have has latched onto a lower-class and soon-to-be-wed Zerlina, sung by vocally agile and sometimes edgy, Jingjing Xu. Zerlina’s profile ticks several of Don Giovanni’s predator predilection boxes laid out by Leporello.
Also from Detroit, a Chrysler K car appears. The Don can’t get it to start—an automotive allegory for his trouble manufacturing his manhood. Back in 2008, when Guth first mounted this scenario in Mozart’s birthplace of Salzburg, the American dollar’s needle was on Empty: then, it cost as much as $1.60 to buy a single euro. You could pick up a vintage K-car—though what German would?—practically for the price of a Currywurst. In the age of predator Trump and his tariffs, this prop in 2026 Berlin proved one of the evening’s funniest gags.
Guth has Leporello, sung with stroppy resignation in Berlin by Friedrich Hamel, read the tally of the Don’s amorous exploits not from the traditional scroll pulled from his satchel but from the tattoos engraved all over his body. The list pained him to compile, both physically and perhaps morally, too. That each seduction led Leporello to hurt himself might also suggest that these inkings represent his own homoerotic desire for the Don. Such are the psychological labyrinths into which interpretative decisions known in Germany as Regietheater (“Director’s Theatre”) can lead. Others (call them traditionalists for the sake of brevity) describe these not as interpretations but as interventions—self-serving and distracting.
Guth’s principal reconfigurations come in the first minutes of the opera after the ominous, then excited overture. The orchestra was directed with portent and then fizz by Finnegan Downie Dear, a conductor possessed of precision, dash, and the best name in opera. The on-stage action commences with Don Giovanni grappling with his latest hook-up, Donna Anna (an eloquent and unpredictable Evelin Novak). In Berlin, this woman is the pursuer, not the pursued. She jumps on her would-be seducer and wraps her legs around him. She, not the Don, is wielding agency. But her lustful intentions are interrupted when her father (a stentorian Taras Shtonda) bursts in, bent on defending his daughter’s honor. He has promised his filial property to Don Ottavio, a part sung by Siyabonga Maqungo, whose voice was as pure and flowing as the stream that didn’t flow through the menacing woodland.
In the tussle between Don and Dad, the stage went black for a moment and a shot rang out. The gun was so loud that the Bavarian widow who had accompanied me to the performance jumped out of her seat and nearly fell over the railing into the orchestra below. When the lights came back on, the Don lay prone on the rough ground, a mortal wound in his side. He wasn’t dead, but his fate was already fixed. Gyula Orendt did the role with an addled obsessiveness that his dying condition demanded as he bled out during his subsequent amorous exertions, subterfuges, masked ball (with a group of lost hikers inexplicably wandering into the grove), and a miserable takeout banquet (catered by Burger King), until the Don toppled into a shallow grave dug for him by back-from-the-dead Commendatore.
The Bavarian widow had made it up the stairs to our first balcony seats at the start of the performance, but asked to take the elevator down after the curtain calls. The lift was packed. She proceeded to air her review for the passengers, not descending to hell as Don Giovanni had at the close of the opera, but to the sartorial purgatory of the coat check. In this slowest elevator currently in operation in the Federal Republic of Germany, she set about demolishing the entire premise of the production. I stood by in full, silent support. Opera, especially this one done these days, should elicit strong opinions. The Bavarian finished her review. The woman closest to us responded: “Gut it was all made good by Don Ottavio’s voice.” The widow then threw him under the bus, just then pulling into Guth’s dark wood in the empty theatre.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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