Recognizing the Don Among Us
By Dave Kopplin

"The starting point was the music," said Pina Bausch in a recent interview about her 1975 choreography for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. I remember well the first time I saw her dramatic interpretation of the Russian composer's masterwork on a local public television station. I'd never seen or heard anything like it. The performance projected a visceral quality that transcended the dancing and the music. For me it was a "gotcha" moment, when all the elements of the work reached me at once, a primordial, archetypal communication that I understood on a mysterious level.

Such are the possibilities when art forms come together, creating an experience that is more than the sum of the individual parts. Poet T.S. Eliot describes this kind of experience as seeming to move "beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life… a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of our eye, and never completely focus on."

Pina Bausch's vision began with the music. Most would argue that this is where any vision of a musical drama should begin, be it ballet, opera, or Singspiel. This is precisely where director Mariusz Trelinski begins. "My work does not start on the stage, but rather in music and with the music," said Mr. Trelinski when his production of Don Giovanni was first seen at LA Opera in 2003. "Everything flows from the music: the entire concept, the aesthetics, the rhythm of the show and the stage design."

In Mozart's day, too, the music was the key element that guided productions, sometimes to the exclusion of all other aspects of production. Singers were left to interpret arias, duets and quartets as they wanted; there were no acting coaches who taught them how to project a part. Indeed, there were few people involved in opera productions except for the conductor, musicians and singers. There were no lighting designers; singers had to stand right at the leading edge of the stage to even be seen by the audience in the weak, reflected light of candles or oil footlights. There were scenic designers and costume designers, but even though some productions in Mozart's day had quite elaborate scenic and costume designs (the graveyard scene, for example, which benefits from dim lighting), neither would have been able to create sets or costumes as intricate and sophisticated as we now experience in a modern opera house. More often than not, sets were simple, costumes straightforward.

There certainly wasn't a single person with a title such as "stage director." Some even believed that actually producing an opera only detracted from the intent of the composer. Johannes Brahms, for example, once refused an offer, according to musicologist Christopher Small, to attend a performance of Don Giovanni, preferring instead to stay home and read the score. "I understand this perfectly," mused Mr. Trelinski. "A director's fundamental task is to not destroy the music."

Not many of us would get very much out of perusing the Don Giovanni score, or imagining our own choreography for a Stravinsky ballet. Modern audiences probably wouldn't respond well to dim, flickering candles and olive oil footlights being the only lighting in opera houses, either. We want imaginative lighting. These days, we want to see a big production. We want to feel it, experience it, and be moved by it. We want the music to move us, yes, and we want singers to act, too. We want to gasp at extraordinary scenic designs and applaud astonishingly flamboyant costumes. Contemporary audiences, used to the special effects in television and film, and in Broadway and Las Vegas shows, insist on a little trickery and magic on the operatic stage, too. We want blasts of fire, live eagles, a sun or moon that actually rises from beneath the stage, or a curving 100-foot-long mechanical dragon that slithers down to the ground from above.

And why not: 19th-century opera was the art form that initiated such rich and epic spectacle, the first art form that demanded collaboration between many other different art forms. Richard Wagner even coined the word Gesamtkunstwerk (roughly translated: "many arts working together in a single work") to describe the level of inter-disciplinary cooperation that was occurring in opera as his century unfolded.

Beginning in the early 19th century, opera productions started to become more elaborate. Lighting got better; in better opera houses, candles gave way to brighter oil lamps powered by pure olive oil. This innovation alone made it possible for scenic and costume designers to begin to think bigger and think bolder. Singers were suddenly able to move around a little more. Orchestras and composers started thinking bigger; impresarios did, too. By the turn of the 20th century, audiences were already getting used to a level of sophistication in productions that would have shocked Viennese audiences in Mozart's day.

As the modern age dawned - the beginning of which musicologist Robert Winter suggests was defined by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913 - opera was a living, breathing art. It will continue to resonate for future generations if directors such as Mr. Trelinski have anything to say about it. "It seems to me insanely critical that opera productions serve as bridges over the flow of time," he notes. "As soon as the music, eternal in quality, combines with a contemporary sensibility, it is evident that opera can be an exciting, fascinating, modern genre."

Don Giovanni has been mounted countless times. From its original production in 1787 in Prague to the early 19th-century London premiere, from the influential late 1930s Glyndebourne Festival production to the hundreds of performances of Don Giovanni presented on American stages, each new production attempts to capture the abstract essence of Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto and Mozart's music. Nevertheless, every step in an opera's artistic collaboration is fraught with peril, from crafting a libretto to composing the music, from staging the production to costuming the dancers or singers, from designing the sets to hiring the musicians for the orchestra. At the same time, every aspect of the collaboration has the ability to heighten the possibilities of reaching that mysterious place beyond conscious comprehension, the "gotcha" moment.

Not every production reaches that seemingly elusive place, either, but clearly something in our collective psyche - and something about Don Giovanni - makes it worth the effort. "When working on such a peculiar beast as this opera, like an anthropologist I try to uncover those aspects that give it such an incredibly long run in the culture," said Mr. Trelinski. "I work on the assumption that if Don Giovanni has been playing for the last two centuries, it isn't just because the music is so incredibly well written, but rather that there's something more in this opera. There is always a myth standing behind it, which makes it 'shine' to this very day. The only problem is how to reach this layer."

New productions, whether of Mozart, Stravinsky or even Shakespeare, continue to reveal more and more of the underlying spirit of timeless works. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a classic story, a tragedy so well known and so universal that it has been told and retold countless times on the world's stages, translated into numerous languages and recreated dozens of times on film. Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet, one of the most recent film versions, is transposed to the modern day, with trigger-happy rival gangs shooting it out on hardscrabble streets, yet it stays very close to Shakespeare's original text. It is a compelling retelling of the story that resonates in its modern setting.

Mr. Trelinski suggests that the process of rethinking the timeless operas is no different. Indeed, it is a necessity. "Madama Butterfly doesn't have to be dressed in floral kimonos," he mused, "and a Russian samovar doesn't have to sit on the table in Eugene Onegin. Continuous, repetitive utilization of the same old solutions is a dangerous process. It numbs the imagination and moves the work into the category of a dying form of art."

Don Giovanni is as relevant today as ever. Giovanni-like characters seem to be everywhere. How can we not be fascinated by Giovanni, a man who flaunts society's moral code with little regard for the consequences? We want him, and those like him, to get their comeuppance; we want to see their inevitable downfall. "Giovanni behaves as if he wanted to hasten his own end," observed Mr. Trelinski. "The opera's significance and impact stems from the fact that it turns various established patterns inside out. Under the cloak of magical, enchanting music, Mozart presents the cruel truth about a world devoid of love, governed just by a game in which the main character, by obliterating everyone around him, obliterates himself."

It should be no surprise that Don Giovanni resonates with us in 2007 just as Stravinsky's 1913 Rite of Spring moves us and Shakespeare's 400-year-old Romeo and Juliet still rings true. These works capture something essential about our nature. Giovanni's story is especially important. We need to recognize him because he lives among us and will continue to do so; we need to see him in a variety of guises, not just the powdered wigs of Mozart's day. Opera can reflect his mercurial character in its current and future states. "It seems to me that in this regard, there is no alternative," comments Mr. Trelinski. "If opera wants to be an art of the future, it must evolve."

Composer Dave Kopplin teaches in the music department at Cal Poly Pomona. He writes regularly for performing arts organizations across the country.