Erwin Schrott is surely the world’s foremost exponent of both the Don and the manservant Leporello. Much, then, was left to the singers in terms of bringing out the broader themes of Da Ponte’s caustic libretto and Mozart’s lyrically pained score. With Grandage’s overall conception and Louisa Miller’s light directorial touch for this first revival, we’re left largely to take our own stand on the action by this production, which resolutely avoids the opera’s deeper undertones. Otherwise, not a great deal happens on stage, despite the occasional neat touch (like the hooded figures in the graveyard implying a community of fathers wronged by the Don), solid choreography from Ben Wright, and a real circle of flames at the end. It opens up on a circular set to reveal, variously, the graveyard, a banquet hall, and yet more balconies, from which we see Giovanni’s conquests – still enraptured, all of them – during Leporello’s “Catalogue Aria”. Christopher Oram’s set has us at street level facing a wall of balconies, out of which characters appear, flirt, escape, and so on. Theatre director Michael Grandage’s 2011 production was his third attempt at opera after a Glyndebourne Billy Budd and a Butterfly in Houston, and it focuses on humour rather than any of the the opera’s undercurrents.

After all, Mozart designated this, his bleakest work, an opera buffa, or comic opera. There is also the question of how to square the deep sexual and class conflicts that are on display throughout the work with its constant humour. Not only is there the problem of how exactly the Don is to be consumed in flames at the end of its three-hour span, or the issue of how to make the statue of the Commendatore come to life. Don Giovanni is perhaps the most difficult of the Mozart–Da Ponte opera trilogy to stage.

The metropolitan opera don giovanni