ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
In the religious drama El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra by Tirso de Molina, the figure of Don Juan first walked the stage in 1613 – however, his origins are uncertain: while some view him as a myth originating in the Spanish folk tradition, other sources cite a real-life model, Don Juan Tenorio from Seville, a careless seducer and man of pleasure from the era of Don Pedro the Cruel, who murdered the governor of Seville and was then lured into a monastery and secretly executed by the monks. Thereafter, a rumor was spread that the statue on the grave of the murdered man had come alive and punished the murderer. For the longest time, the blackguard was justly condemned to hell, to the audiences’ delight and satisfaction, but Mozart gave him a new dimension in his opera. Here, the evildoer almost becomes a sympathetic figure. Of course, Mozart would not be Mozart if he had not discovered a spark of godliness even in this being, and thus, the question remains: is Mozart’s Don Giovanni perhaps not a myth, not a primal force, similar to Eros or Dionysus? Is he merely a human being like the rest of us, aware of his finite existence on earth, and merely wanting to make the most of his brief life span?
Ronny Dietrich