Post-Giovanni quotes Mozart

Paweł Goźliński, TEATR

1.
Jarzyna has overdone it - critics thundered after Giovanni's premiere. Well then, I will "do it" too; after all, it seems impossible to talk about don Juan without mentioning doing it. I will do it, then, and summarize unfaithfully their arguments as well as their equally unfaithful deeds with semantics, grammar, and even logic.
So critics admonished Jarzyna that one shouldn't do it - I mean cross the boundaries: theater is theater and opera is opera, and when one mixes up the two one ends up in a circus (my comment), and in a circus they torment animals.
One shouldn't do it - that is, naturally, move from theater to railway station back and forth - because I think it stinks at the railway station, while at the opera it should smell like Szymanowski, only with Guerlaine!
One shouldn't do it - that is, get rid of wooden opera singers - I suppose because it is improper to persecute the physically disabled.
Altogether, one shouldn't do it, especially on stage.
But as ancient doctors saw in the excess of (male and female) seed a source of many serious illnesses, including hysteria and melancholy, I think it sometimes makes sense to do it... In order to present a modicum of distance and give up, in my opinion, fruitless arguments concerning actors' costumes and taking those off, genre mixing, limits of the director's jurisdiction - and reviewer's jurisdiction as well. If I did not, I would start to creak like an old dried-up wardrobe so loud that it could drown out the Don Giovanni conducted by Abbado as the overture just ended.

2.
And while we are talking about overture: I have the impression that this strange, slowed down, broken rhythm of Jarzyna's Giovanni first scene, with climax when the glass breaks in the bathtube, was dictated by the musical prologue of Mozart's opera. Except the audience did not hear the music - they merely ogled Anna's (Stenka) as she provoked Giovanni (Chyra) with her T-shirt wet with champagne in a luxurious bathroom. This was to spite Kierkegaard, I thought, who, instead of sitting in the house like any decent Copenhagener, stayed in the foyer until the end of a Don Giovanni performance. "Then the music impresses me strongest, he explained, it becomes a peculiar world beyond me."
If we treated seriously his interpretation of Don Giovanni, all producers of Mozart's super opera would be doomed to failure. In fact, it is not theater we should blame, but Christianity. It was Christianity that - oh sweet dialectic! - created eroticism by means of its negation, denial, forgetting. However, the Eros, an inseparable part of human nature since antiquity, did not surrender; pure sensuality remained an overwhelming, demonic power struggling for its place, its manifestation. The denied, the absent, as Kierkegaard seems to suggest, can manifest itself only out of solid form, returning as pure immediacy.
Because the point is not a "worded battle, but primal rage."
And here dialectic intervenes again: in art, pure sensuality pursues a form where flesh, along with its burden of urges, would be totally absent, where pure spirit roams - namely in music. Music, to put it simply, is pure eroticism, a perfect expression of its energetic nature; but it is also a trap for the Eros, as it is an eternal act of realization; a lost struggle in pursuit of a solid form. And therfore, says Kierkegaard, music is demonic, though it will never turn into a demon; it remains an eternal unfulfillment, a melancholic dream - a Don Giovanni. Let us yield the floor to Kierkegaard who phrased it most explicitly when he wrote about Mozart's music as "only an elemental voice of desire, a play of lust, a wild din of ecstasy," and about don Juan as "a picture that appears continually but never attains a concrete shape, an individual continually created but never taking on a final form, whose history we know as much as the hum of waves." The myth of Faust can be retold and rewritten eternally, the eccentric of Copenhagen wrote, but not the myth of don Juan: it has already reached perfection, namely in Mozart's music, and every attempt to close it in some discursive form - or theatrical form for that matter - would be a betrayal of its musical perfection. Therefore directors, beware: if you attempt to stage Don Giovanni, even with pure heart and in all fairness to the master's work, even with utmost humility, you will betray Mozart anyway.
This envisioned unity - idea and music, music and work - belongs by all means to the sphere of romantic illusions and bad habits. Sometimes, however, they are worth recalling: they can spare us other, perhaps more preposterous, illusions. And so as I went to see Grzegorz Jarzyna's Giovanni, I did not yearn for any ideal theatrical form for the music. I even found amusing the director's explanations that in putting actors instead of singers on-stage and making them lip-sync Mozart's music, he hopes to reach some special metaphysical depth and that dramatic actors, thanks to their "instrumentation," will be able to elicit some unknown "sounds" from Mozart, or rather da Ponte (Krystian Lupa made the same naive mistake when staging The Magic Flute in Vienna).
Of course, Jarzyna is right: it can be disheartening to watch puppet-like opera singers entangled in the machinery of modern opera-theatre. You would like to shake them, rid of their learned means of - excusez le mot - expression; do something so that their bodies cease to be merely soundboxes and start to react to emotions, conflicts, contents of the arias, duets and recitatives. And if that turns out to be impossible, chase them away from the stage, save the voices but give the roles to someone else.
Naturally, his solution is not universal and probably was never meant to be. Even if Maja Ostaszewska did create in Giovanni a portrait of an innocent though soiled sacrificer Donna Elvira, precise and touching at every emotional peak (I think I was not misled when I saw in her a reflection of Dostoyevsky's heroines), her body during the arias surrendered to the music and she turned into a doll mouthing the words. Danuta Stenka, too, in her emotional pantomime still remained a suffering diva. I must admit, though, she was fabulous in one scene: after the anal - and moral - rape by Giovanni during the aria Or Sai Chi L'Onore, she was transformed from a harmed woman into a revengeful fury of striking dignity. Every element of her "score" was worth a Hail Mary - if not a mass altogether. And it is definitely worth to be taught at vocal classes.
Despite all her efforts, it however remained a great interpretation of only one aria while the music imposed on her its rules and limitations. So although Jarzyna's actresses proved that they knew how to bring out their characters from the shadow of Giovanni's passion and make them speak with the tragic voices of harmed women, as far as Mozart is concerned, they had the odds against them, because music - without touching the words, only enveloping them with its invisible veil - always says more.
With one exception perhaps: when Cezary Kosiński's Leporello recited (yes, recited!) his congenial, archphenomenal and all-masterly (adjectives are failing me!) catalog aria (Madamina, Il Catalogo E Questo), I did not miss the music in the least. He managed to elicit, in a grotesque Polish translation, what seemed to me the most important trait of Jarzyna's production: something that not only justifies such tampering with Mozart, all those crossings from opera to theater, but renders them indispensable; something, in fact, simple and banal: Kosiński ironically quoted the myth of don Juan by Mozart/da Ponte.

3.
"In fact, he could have been absent," my wife said after the performance. She was talking about Chyra's Giovanni. She did not mean his musical diabolism, which cannot be contained in a theatrical character, far from it. This melancholic - who was seducing not forced by some primal fire of passion but out of habit, tormented by demon of inertia, compulsively devouring sherbets, sweetmeats and women - seems to be his own shadow on the stage; if anything, a personification of utter defeat.
From this viewpoint, the relation between Giovanni and his father, played on the verge of nonexistence by Zygmut Malanowicz (and sloppily copied from Molière - this is the fault of the adaptation as a whole), seems interesting; it could have opened some psychoanalytical perspectives before our character, explained and solved the conflicts tormenting him, or at least let him find temporary relief through an exchange of devastating emotions for a discourse full of understanding. Giovanni, however, plays only a comedy of reformation and thrice rejects his father, in whose creased face he could have recognized himself; the specter of his own death.
Even death - as a chance to confer if not sense, then tragic dignity about his life - does not seem tempting anymore. Giovanni will simply eat until he dies. The Commandatore's voice in the finale will come from the other world. Not heaven - oh, no! It will only be an echo, yet another quote reaching Giovanni from the realm of his own phantasms. It will neither fill or justify the emptiness of the seducer's death.
In fact, in Jarzyna's production, Mozart's Don Giovanni seems quoted right from the beginning. Directly after murdering of Commandatore, Giovanni appears in a theater's foyer. From behind the closed doors the overture sounds, and on the stage - invisible for Giovanni's audience - an opera performance is about to begin. At the same time on the "real" stage, the fate (or we should rather say, a cause) of a quite different character will be sealed: not of any "don" - just Giovanni.
Jarzyna gave up the noble title not because of some meaningless whim or simply as a sign of "modernization". Denis de Rougemont, who beautifully "deactivated" the Kierkegaardian myth of Don Giovanni, noticed that Mozart's hero does not in the least represent a "primal fire of passion," nature and sensuality in its purest form; no, he is a "Don" - a great lord and master reveling most not in eroticism, but rather in anarchy. "Don Juan, de Rougemont writes, enters a community living by its specific norms with the intention not so much to get free from them as to violate them." Like every moralist he devotes his life to absolute as well as abstract concepts of good and justice, yet he continually turns against them. The fact that his immoral project is realized in a world of lust and sensuality is not in the least a key to understanding the myth of don Juan. What he pursues so eagerly is not sex.
The compulsive defusing of sexual tension in which don Juan "burns out" serves merely as a cunning trap for his anarchic energy. "By channeling his passion into pleasure, de Rougemont writes, society receives a scarce compensation for it, and the course of things remains unaltered despite his counterproductive efforts."
If it is not about sex, if sex is only a defense mechanism, a warranty of durability of social order, then what is Don Giovanni trying to escape from? What is he pursuing with such a suicidal determination?
"He seeks who does not have, and also perhaps he who is not," muses de Rougemont, who adds: "He who has lives on what he has and does not abandon it for the sake of uncertainty. Only if he truly has, of course." According to him, don Juan epitomizes a simple psychological mechanism: the inability to make choice, to subscribe to love in the name of defining the limits of one's own ego.
It is from himself that don Giovanni escapes, tempted by the vision of going beyond his own limits forever; the vision of his own infinity and immortality. "Don't look back" is his life's motto. Don't look back at yourself trapped in the past, in the catalogue you have instead of memories. An expanse of limitless possibilities - a seductress greater than yourself - opens her arms before you.
True, but de Rougemont (just like Kierkegaard) would like to "cure" don Juan of his illusions. He would most willingly see us all happily married, he would match don Giovanni with Donna Elvira again and turn him into Tristan, the eternal monogamist. But what else could we expect from the author of the book on the mythology of Western eroticism, whose superhero is a faithful husband refusing 1003 seductive proposals?
Personally, I am seduced by another thread in his analysis: an analogy between don Juan and the author of Beyond Good and Evil, before whose understanding "a thousand and three truths yielded and not a single one could stop him." For a moralist à rebours there is no experience more dreadful than despair and boredom after violating the rules which are no more sacred; when no one threatens him with death for the violation; the Commandatore's avenging voice does not tempt him with death anymore; it is merely a quote from an opera staged somewhere else.
For Nietzsche, the silence of God means the end of experience (though he will be saved by the idea of a Great Return, de Rougemont adds). The silence of God is also the end of don Juan's myth. If we attempted to analyze modernity with its help, it would merely turn to a quotation, a dream about a world that fights back, where rebellion, even unconcluded and unfulfilled, can confer senses on existence. It would turn into a kitsch script that we can stage, but cannot repeat.

4.
A kitsch Don Giovanni? Of course, and even more: reused. The opera as such - born from the faith in reaching back to the origins of tragedy while in fact feeding on leftovers of myths, remnants of theatrical motives and characters - always seemed to me fraught with fraudulence. It is a pure alchemy that music of Monteverdi, Mozart and Verdi could thrive on this meager fodder.
So I do not fret or fume that Giovanni - staged in some super luxurious penthouse and starring screen lover Andrzej Chyra - seems strangely similar to domestic romantic comedies. I would die for Mazetto and Zerlina's wedding scene set in a cheap joint with a dance floor. And why is Giovinette Che Fate All'Amore not sung by a virgin and delicate Zerlina but by some buxom hairdresser or checker performing Mozart's aria as if it were a Polish disco hit? That is just a signum temporis.
Sometimes, however, Jarzyna gets defeated, and by Mozart on top of it. Especially in the scene where the masked ball turns into orgy at Giovanni's. Not because of naked girls or two gentlemen practising fellatio in the bathroom; simply because the director cannot keep pace with the precision and dynamism of, how to put it, the musical drama of the Salzburgian.
As far as kitsch is concerned, all Jarzyna's ambivalence towards Mozart's Don Giovanni is clearly visible. He wants on the one hand to be fair, to find for the masterpiece the most adequate modern form (what today must mean: questioned, challenged or unmasked); and on the other hand, in an attempt to be fair to the myth, he must discredit it. He must expose its idleness, futility, inadequacy in a world a priori deflowered, offering no resistance to the seducer, where seduction is present on a regular basis - not as a transgression anymore, but as a compulsion. A world where music, no more a demonic voice of suppressed sensuality, becomes (if we were so naive so as to search it for direct and dangerous connections to human psyche) at best an imitation of erotic babbles about "the culture of premature ejaculation" (the director, in an attempt to justify his Giovanni, most often quoted Baudrillard).
This way Jarzyna, to some extent paradoxically, could be deemed a new moralist overthrowing libertarian myths and exposing a spiritually immature individual under the guise of don Juan; a minute archetypal role model from a color magazine. Twice as pathetic, because still trying to play the main role in a definitely heterosexual myth; desperately clutching at the male identity he borrowed from it; always involved in a banal love triangle, while the surrounding world - together with the shyly loving Leporello - becomes more and more queer.
What he longs for, however, is earnestness of sin, not pathos of grace and salvation. This trait most potently links him to Mozart's character and seemingly transforms him into a tragic hero - even if his tragedy is that of postmodern melancholic lost in nameless moments between desire and fulfillment. Tragedy of this sort can be built on stage only from shards of utopia, exaggeration - and a music so perfect that it can compete with silence. Only such Giovanni sounds true and serves an example of how masterpieces should be handled today: we should question not only their mythic foundations and traditional form, but their status as masterpieces and identity created by interpreters as well.
And that is the reason why Jarzyna has to be "unfaithful" to Mozart, has to allow himself "donjuaneries" with all their consequences, including "donjuanian" melancholy in a theater epitomized by unquenchable yearning and chase for a masterpiece. As is the case with melancholy, this is a chase for something lost before the pursuit had even begun.
To those not taking part in it, I recommend musical equipment of the iPod type. I have a few versions of Don Giovanni on mine, and thanks to that I do not need to wait for the masterpiece - not for a moment.