Don Giovanni

In the organizer's words:

In Mozart's dramma giocoso DON GIOVANNI, a character is up to mischief who seems familiar to us, whom we think we know, and yet who says of himself: "Who I am, you will never know." Director Roland Schwab purposefully made his way through the material, which is overloaded with interpretations, searching for his very own approach, finding the demonic Don Giovanni, one through whose eyes one can plunge into deep black holes one moment, only to succumb to his wit the next ... Conductor: Daniel Cohen; Director: Roland Schwab; With Davide Luciano, Flurina Stucki, Matthew Newlin, Patrick Guetti, Maria Motolygina, Joel Allison, Artur Garbas, Lilit Davtyan and others.
"Where did you get the insane rights to which you have devoted your life?", George Sand asks the legendary. To Gottfried Benn he casually confides, "I once dreamed that a young birch tree gave me a son." No other art figure of modern times has received more journalistic attention than Don Juan, that "Seducer of Seville" who fled from the pen of a Spanish monk in 1613. Only seven years younger than his compatriot Don Quixote, he has since made his way through dramas, epics, novels and operas, and has haunted cinema screens and plasma screens. Against changing moral backgrounds, he boasts - memorial and icon - with his famous list, laid out against death, which he casts as a stone shadow. "Mine shall be hell!", Lord Byron heard him say.

A cutting chord opens the overture to a dramma giocoso about the death course of DON GIOVANNI, conducted by the composer, at the Count Nostiz National Theater in Prague on October 29, 1787. In the history of musical theater, this moment can be retrospectively compared to the Big Bang. In order to get into the character of the licentious libertine and blasphemer, lyricist Lorenzo da Ponte had to get himself into the mood again and again by flirting with the daughter of his landlady. Mozart himself, successful the year before with his FIGARO, composes under great time pressure for a fee of 1000 guilders. The overture is not finished until 7 o'clock in the evening on the day of the premiere. A "lightning" is seen by Søren Kierkegaard, which "breaks out of the darkness of the weather cloud, more unsteady than the latter, and yet just as tactful. Hear passion's unbridled desire, hear love's murmur, hear temptation's murmur, hear seduction's whirl, hear the moment's silence - hear, hear, hear Mozart's Don Juan!"

The journey to hell, to which the archetype of moral turpitude has been condemned up to now, drives in him this time as a soul. For his end, the whole occidental metaphysics is used, but it no longer only confirms the righteous in their indignation, but also causes consternation. The freedom that the libertine praises against the prescribed humility makes him an anarchic prototype on the threshold of the French Revolution. In his licentiousness, as a life plan peeled from the dictates of hormones, libidinal longings and fantasies of self-realization of subsequent generations can be reflected.

The 19th century will conflate it with Faust, only to leave it to psychoanalysis, weighed down by its meaning. Julia Kristeva locates in him the "son of a mother who becomes a dreamer with her husband and passes on to her little one that he may conquer all women as no one has ever conquered her herself". That he could be sad, Albert Camus considers unlikely. How the "laughter, the victorious insolence, the leaping," the profoundly earthy, that the French philosopher diagnoses in him can be deceptive! - With D.H. Lawrence the restless one muses: "Where is there peace for me? The mystery must be in love with me ..."

What drives the seducer through the bedrooms of the centuries? What hunts the hunter? Who is this man, who only ever means, really? This content has been machine translated.