An indulgent trip to the opera on a balmy Sunday evening.
Don Giovanni is one of my favourite operas, and Madrid's opulent teatro real is a stunning place to see it.
The opera wasn't quite what I'd imagined it would be. The orchestra and the singers were outstanding, but the staging was bizarrely static and contrived. After every scene, the curtain fell with a sudden crash to the stage: the first time, there were gasps from the audience as we assumed it had come tumbling down by accident.
With the story rewritten so that it all takes place in the same room in one house, the singers had to go through some impressive miming to hold the story together. In the famous scene where Giovanni invites the statute of the Commendatore to dinner, the singers mime the whole affair to an invisible statue, much to the audience's confusion.
 |
| Photo sourced here (Javier del Real) |
Rather than a scandalous, unrepenting rogue, Don Giovanni is played as a drunkard going slowly mad.
My favourite scene, where hell opens and the statute drags Don Giovanni down into the depths, was something of an anticlimax. In this production the scene seems to become a metaphor for Giovanni's final descent into madness, or the inevitable result of a life of excess: he clutches his chest and collapses, as if having a heart attack, but the literal hellfires and booming choirs of demons are nowhere to be seen.
 |
| Russell Braun as Don Giovanni Photo sourced here (Javier del Real) |
But the music is, of course, absolutely beautiful, and despite the bizarre direction the singers were superb.
A very Spanish glass of cava and slice of tortilla on the sun terrace during the interval, overlooking the Palacio Real, made for a dreamy Sunday evening.
