Don Giovanni
Opera IC Audiophile series
Details
In Brief
There are evenings when our Opera House cannot perform because rehearsals are ongoing on stage until the evening. There are audience members who can only afford to hear their favourite pieces with a discount. And there are works that, although very popular, cannot be staged every season due to the congestion of productions. All these issues can be solved at once by the Hungarian State Opera’s new IC series, whose name carries the of iron curtain, but which may also gain popularity with the speed of an express train. Even though it will feature in the programme as a regular series beginning only with the next season, we are already presenting this new, semi-staged operatic format that offers more than concert performances on selected evenings during the current one as a preview. The titles are major works by great composers, requiring smaller choruses but offering fewer but particularly significant soloist roles.
A mere hour after a stage rehearsal, visitors having purchased their ticket with a 20% discount find the iron curtain of the Opera House lowered. The massive double steel plate, covering a surface of 170 m², does not only conceal the set of the next production behind it but also serve as an acoustic reflector meeting audiophile standards. Onto this enormous surface, decorated with architect Miklós Ybl’s engravings, we project a unique video installation, with Hungarian and English surtitles displayed at the top. The orchestra takes its usual place in the pit, while the hand-picked, first-rate singers step through the door in the iron curtain to take a seat at the front of the stage, then step into the limelight when it is their turn to sing.
The form is quasi-concert-like, but the soloists do not use sheet music, they appear in period costumes, and can use their faces, hands, and bodies for dramatic gestures. The participating chorus performs from various points of the building to astonish the audience with a powerful 3D sound. From all this, a single, significant, shared experience can emerge: the wonder of sound that feels much closer to the audience, magnifying gestures and offering a far more intense, truly record-quality experience in an auditorium that is thus transformed into one with the best acoustics in Hungary, the concert hall of the Opera House.
In the 2026/27 season, audiophile concert performances of Bluebeard's Castle, Don Giovanni, Rigoletto, and Tosca continue the series started in 2025.
Parental guidance
Events
Premiere: Nov. 4, 2025
Synopsis
Act One
Leporello is tired of waiting for Don Giovanni, who is busy pursuing an amorous adventure. Just as he is about to leave, there is trouble. Donna Anna and Don Giovanni quarrel; suddenly, Anna’s father, the Commendatore, appears, intent on defending his daughter’s honour. Anna realizes the danger her father is in and hastens off to call for help. The Commendatore and Don Giovanni fight. Leporello helps Don Giovanni to escape. When Anna returns with her fiancé, Don Ottavio, they find her father lying in a pool of blood. Anna tries to comprehend what has happened and demands that Ottavio avenge her father.
When a female voice is heard complaining angrily about her husband’s infidelity, Giovanni is immediately willing to console the unhappy woman. He only realizes at the last moment that the unknown woman is Donna Elvira, whom he once married and then abandoned. He leaves it to Leporello to enlighten her about his love life. Elvira stays behind, heartbroken, but then decides to avenge the insult she has suffered.
Giovanni and Leporello encounter a wedding party. The young bride Zerlina awakens Giovanni’s interest. He orders Leporello to remove her bridegroom Masetto and the other guests. Giovanni has no problems dispelling Zerlina’s scruples regarding Masetto when he promises to marry her; she cannot resist his seductive manner. Before Giovanni gets what he wants, however, Elvira discovers the pair and unsettles Zerlina with her accusations about Giovanni.
While he is still annoyed about the failure of his plans, Giovanni meets Anna and Ottavio, who appeal to his friendship for help. Again, Elvira appears and causes confusion by accusing Giovanni of infidelity. Ottavio does not know what to make of these accusations. Anna understands the desperation of the woman she does not know, who Giovanni simply declares to be mad. When Giovanni has left with her, Anna’s confession comes pouring out: she accuses Giovanni not only of attempted rape, but also of her father’s murder. Trying to calm his bride down, Ottavio decides to find out the truth.
Zerlina, who has returned to Masetto, tries to deflect his accusations of having betrayed him even on their wedding day. No sooner has he relented and is willing to be reconciled than they hear Giovanni’s voice. Zerlina’s fearful reaction sparks Masetto’s jealousy anew. Despite her pleas not to leave her alone, Masetto hides in order to find out the truth about his bride and Giovanni. Before there can be another love-scene, his jealousy wins out and he interrupts them. Don Giovanni plays down the situation and pretends that he only wanted to celebrate their wedding with them in style.
Ottavio, accompanied by Anna and Elvira, wants to find out whether Giovanni has really committed the crimes the women accuse him of. They mingle with the guests who are being entertained by Leporello, so that Giovanni may have another opportunity to take Zerlina away from her bridegroom – this time by force. Her loud cries for help put the assembled company on their trail. Giovanni tries to make Leporello his scapegoat. Nobody believes him anymore. Cornered, Giovanni flees his opponents.
Act Two
Resolved to abandon Giovanni once and for all, Leporello ultimately does not have the heart to leave him to his fate. When Elvira appears once more, Giovanni charms her, but then forces Leporello to change clothes with him and take his place. Elvira falls for the ruse and follows Leporello, assuming that she has won her husband back. Giovanni, finally rid of Elvira, dreams of new amorous delights when he is interrupted by Masetto, who is looking for Giovanni in order to take revenge. Giovanni pretends to be Leporello. By promising that he will help in the hunt for Giovanni, he manages to disarm Masetto. After he has beaten him up, Zerlina finds the wounded Masetto.
Elvira, who still believes that she is in the company of her husband, is enjoying their reconciliation; Leporello tries to escape the situation, but Anna, Ottavio, Masetto and Zerlina prevent this. Believing that they have finally found Giovanni, they want revenge. At that point, Leporello reveals that he was disguised. The pursuers realize that they have been duped once again. Ottavio has now dispelled even his last doubts about Don Giovanni’s crimes, and he decides to ensure his punishment.
Despite the betrayal she has suffered, Donna Elvira is worried about Don Giovanni – she senses that his end is near. At that point, they hear a voice threatening to end Giovanni’s life. Giovanni suspects a prank, Leporello is convinced that it can only be the Commendatore, come to demand satisfaction from Giovanni. Giovanni demands, Leporello should invite him for dinner. When he refuses, Giovanni issues the invitation himself. The voice accepts.
Ottavio promises Anna that Don Giovanni’s punishment is imminent and presses her to marry him. Anna is evasive. Giovanni, expecting his end, has Leporello serve him an opulent meal. Once more, Elvira forces her way into his presence. Fearing for his life, she begs him to change his ways – in vain. He is willing to bear the consequences and accepts his death.
©Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin
Opera guide
Introduction
Don Giovanni is an inexhaustible, multifaceted masterpiece: every age feels at home in it, an eternal provocation, pure chilling sensuality, pulsing sexuality. It presents living patterns of desire as the metaphysical conflict of body and spirit, as a kind of medieval natural machismo and enlightened, emancipated love, as the contrast between possible and impossible fulfilment in love, or even as a thought construction based on the opposition of worldly and otherworldly “truth,” or of what is according to nature and what contradicts it. Mozart speaks much more of the demonic nature of desire, which at times uplifts, at other times drains: a good example is Donna Elvira’s paradoxical helplessness in the face of her desire, which is both redeeming and to be destroyed, but also Don Giovanni’s self-indulgent rhetoric and his many permanently self-endangering provocations, probing the boundaries of himself. Don Giovanni is also a liberating libertine: in his view, existence makes no sense without extreme emotions, and a memorable destruction is the proof of a full existence.
Mozart’s opera has a marvellous structure; besides Kierkegaard or Géza Fodor, perhaps it was Géza Peskó who described it most originally when he explored the “kaleidoscopic” use of tonalities: “The music of Don Giovanni remains within a distance of seven key signatures. Within this distance lies the boundary of earthly modulations; beyond it they lose their meaning. Touching the distance of eight key signatures in fact signals the end of the adventures and experiences of the living, opening the gate to the other world.” The essence of the opera is precisely this opening of gates: through the vision of lived hell and heaven, to peek into the justice of the hell and/or heaven that can be intuited in eternity.
Zoltán Csehy
The opera of all operas
The opera of all operas – following a well-founded, even cemented cliché, we often refer to Don Giovanni this way. Yet the work’s legendarium is so sprawling and its cultural background so immense that at times we forget its most obvious feature: that Don Giovanni is an opera. And what’s more, a comic opera, since the designation dramma giocoso in its own age did not mean some kind of double-natured operatic type but straightforward comic operas. This fact, of course, does not render impossible – nor futile – the enlargement of Don Giovanni into a world drama, a romantically broadened vision, by a great conductor or director; after all, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s filmed Salzburg performance of 1954 accomplished precisely such a miracle. But the default Don Giovanni (if we can even speak of such a thing!) is a comic opera, and as such it poses challenges for its performers that extend far beyond the purely vocal.
For a comic opera must appear entirely effortless and self-evident in every moment on stage, and only truly successful performances can conjure this illusion. “Traditional” operatic clowning can prove just as disappointing here as the careless delivery of recitatives. For whether Don Giovanni (or practically any other comic opera) is sung in Italian or Hungarian, it is the lively drive and natural rhythm of the recitatives that can create the all-important underlying impression that both the ripostes and counter-ripostes – and through them, the entire story – are being born right before the audience’s eyes.
Another great and singular difficulty in any performance of Don Giovanni is that it must make vivid the extraordinary stature and masculine allure of the title character. Many significant operatic roles can be solved without a commanding personality and sex appeal, but in the case of Don Giovanni’s figure, even the most radical Regietheater practice most often finds indispensable the presence of a stage “big beast.” It is not necessary for the performer to bring the entire legend and literary tradition of the role with him onto the stage, but even in our era, so conspicuously deficient in personalities, it remains a basic expectation from the audience that a captivating man should step forth in this role. The currently fashionable barihunks craze – the hype surrounding strikingly macho baritones (and bass-baritones and basses) – in principle favours the fulfilment of this expectation, although masculine bearing and a sculpted torso alone are far from a guarantee of a truly representative stage presence.
And finally, however much the legendary or, in a fortunate case, the currently appearing Don Giovanni may stand out from his environment, Mozart’s opera still demands perfectly attuned teamwork, sensitively wrought ensemble playing. Without this, for example, the Act I finale can turn messy and – shameful even to write it! – dull, while the sextet following the title character’s damnation may even appear downright superfluous. That is why a Don Giovanni performance can endure at most a weak Masetto without suffering serious damage, but any vulnerability in Zerlina or Don Ottavio tends to upset the delicate balance, which when achieved is nothing less than ideal.
Ferenc László