written by jonathan lyness, Conductor/continuo
17th June 2026
Don Giovanni is the second of Mozart and Da Ponte’s three operatic masterpieces, arriving hot on the heels of their first venture together The Marriage of Figaro. Unlike Figaro, which is an ‘opera buffa’ – that is, a popular comic opera based on contemporary people and situations – Don Giovanni is a ‘dramma giocoso’, a rarer form that generally combines three items: comedy, melodrama and the supernatural.
The opera is highly sophisticated for its time, musically powerful and dramatically tense. Unlike Figaro which is generally both joyful and hilarious in the rehearsal room, the rehearsal process for Don Giovanni is often physically and emotionally draining. Don Giovanni himself is a brutal, serially seducing womaniser and a murderer who leaves a trail of deceived and broken women in his wake, plus a string of dead and seriously wounded fathers and husbands etc. This has an impact, and I’ve known singers in the role having to take ‘time out’ after a rehearsal to shake off their characters before re-entering the outside world!
The term dramma giocoso is a good one. The ‘comedy’ comes from the interplay between Giovanni and his manservant Leporello, one of opera’s all-time great creations. Their humour is dark, but also ‘laugh-out-loud’ funny! The audience are asked to enjoy their sadistic mirth, and one of the scariest aspects to this opera is that the audience usually oblige! The ‘melodrama’ concerns Giovanni’s latest conquest Donna Anna, her fiancé Don Ottavio and the impassioned Donna Elvira, a previous ‘lover’ who is back on the scene. Elvira is amazing! But it is to Elvira’s maid that Don Giovanni sings his famously seductive serenade, another moment when audiences need to watch out for themselves and remember who he is!
The third item that defines the opera – the ‘supernatural’ – gives the opera its fame and notoriety. Don Giovanni asks a statue of The Commendatore (Donna Anna’s father, who Giovanni has earlier slain down) to dinner, and the statue arrives. We, in fact, hear the statue’s music right at the beginning of the opera, with its rich chromaticism and foreboding intensity. But this music’s return at the entrance of the statue is still, some 240 years after it was written, an explosive ‘tour de force’. With Don Giovanni finally and inevitably sent to hell and damnation, the audience can relax and hopefully forgive themselves for finding any of his earlier banter as funny as they probably did!
Don Giovanni is on from 23rd September – 3rd October 2026. You can book tickets here.
Directed by Richard Studer | Conducted by Jonathan Lyness
Posted on 17 June 2026
