There is a false assumption among some directors that the anti-hero of Mozart's 1787 opera, Don Giovanni is Italian. So Joseph Losey turned his 1979 film version into a tour of Palladian architecture in and around Venice, and English National Opera's last production, by Guy Joosten in 1995, was designed as if by Caravaggio. In fact the character is Spanish, for despite its name the opera is set in Seville. There is a false assumption among some directors that the anti-hero of Mozart's 1787 opera, Don Giovanni is Italian. So Joseph Losey turned his 1979 film version into a tour of Palladian architecture in and around Venice, and English National Opera's last production, by Guy Joosten in 1995, was designed as if by Caravaggio.
In fact the character is Spanish, for despite its name the opera is set in Seville. The conceit ignores the fact that the fictional Don Juan, as created by the Spanish monk-playwright Tirso de Molina in the 1620s, was dubbed the Trickster or Libertine of Seville. And it was he who inspired writers across Europe, among them Moli?, Pushkin, Byron, even Shaw, not to mention the authors of about 40 other operas on the theme, making Seville the most popular opera setting of all cities. (That The Marriage of Figaro, The Barber of Seville, Fidelio, La Forza del Destino and Carmen are set there too suggests the notion of Seville as a metaphor for sex is a subject in itself.)It is thought that Tirso may have based his character on a real figure, Don Juan de Tassis, the reprobate Count of Villamediana. But documents in the Spanish state archives at Simancas suggest that he was gay, at a time when homosexuality was a capital offence, and that his reputation as a womaniser was a self-protective smokescreen.
A police report from 1622 identifies him as the leader of an illegal homosexual cult in Madrid, and a note written by Philip IV "order[s] that nothing be published of his shame".Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, claims that the real Don Juan was Miguel Manara, a Corsican living in Seville. His exploits uncannily mirror those of the fictional Don, even down to his seduction of a woman "known for the perfection of her purity" (like Donna Anna in the opera), whose father he murdered. But Manara wasn't born until 1627, about the time Tirso's play was first staged.Next week a new production of Don Giovanni opens in London by the Catalan Calixto Bieito, artistic director of Barcelona's Teatre Romea. No stranger to controversy, he is best known here for the plays he's brought to the Edinburgh Festival the outstandingly lucid and compelling Life is a Dream, and last year's excoriated Barbaric Comedies. With this production he is returning the action to Spain: "There are so many Spanish references".Updated to the present day, the action takes place on a Friday night in what could be Seville's Alameda, once the red-light district but now centre of the city's nightlife, as a group of young people go out in search of a good time. "It's about a desperate need for enjoyment, to escape real life About having a really bad night out," he says. It's also about youth: "The energy and emotions are all those of the young." He is delighted that the principal singers are all in their twenties or early thirties."Don Giovanni is a nihilist and a hedonist I'm concerned with his character rather than the myth.
