A pearl rediscovered: Muti conducts “Don Giovanni” in Turin

Between November 18 and 26, Riccardo Muti conducts five performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Teatro Regio di Torino, Italy’s Royal Theater of Turin. Composed in 1787 and one of Mozart’s three operas set to an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni is a dramma giocoso, which roughly translates to a “playful drama.” This juxtaposition of the tragic and comic is one that conductor Riccardo Muti and director Chiara Muti explored with profound understanding and appreciation for every note and word of the text, neither of them afraid to explore the opera’s dark material.

“The key is already in the overture,” said Muti, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Zell Music Director who last conducted the overture from the famous opera in Chicago in September 2018. “The beginning is tragic, in the funeral key of D minor, that of Mozart’s Requiem,” Muti told Valerio Cappelli of Corriere della Sera. “It sounds like music from the afterlife; it begins with a conjuring of hell, then, after the strings seem to moan, we pass into a contrasting cheerful, fast movement where the game of an irrepressible, whirling race is triggered — that of an unfulfilled and unfulfillable life.” The conductor and director explored the ways in which the character of Don Giovanni — in this production literally a puppet master — creates disorder in the lives of all he encounters as well as embodies that same destructive chaos. “There is no other work by Mozart that is so pervaded by the sense of death, but also present is the playfulness, [evident] in the double entendre, in the winks,” said Muti.

This marks the fourth staged production of Don Giovanni conducted by Muti during his career, in addition to his 1995 recording of the opera with the Vienna Philharmonic. “The first was in 1987 at La Scala, with the beautiful direction of Giorgio Strehler,” said Muti in an interview with La Repubblica’s Anna Bandettini. “Then in 1990 in Salzburg and in 1999 at the Theater an der Wien, directed by [Roberto] De Simone, interesting because it showed that Don Giovanni is an immortal figure.” In the Turin production, Don Giovanni is in a sort of afterlife or hell of his own making.

This is Muti’s second production with Teatro Regio, following the 2021 production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, also directed by his daughter Chiara Muti. The conductor was very pleased with the orchestra for these most recent performances, noting in another interview with Corriere Della Sera that among its ranks were several former members of the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra that Muti founded in 2004. Luca Castelli of Torino Corriere asked Muti, in anticipation of his second Mozart opera in the capital city of Italy’s Piedmont region, “Is Turin a Mozartian city?” Muti informed him that Mozart did indeed spend a few days in Turin, but noted the more important fact in his view: “In the more than 50 years that I have conducted works by Mozart, I am sure of one thing: his love for Italy. There is a letter in which he writes that ‘a performance in Naples (Muti’s hometown) is worth more than 200 concerts in Germany.’ ”

The first performance of Don Giovanni, on Nov. 18, marked a grand re-opening of the Teatro Regio di Torino following months of closure required to renovate the stage. Italian dignitaries in attendance included Vice President of the Senate Anna Rossomando and the Undersecretary for Culture Vittorio Sgarbi, who were welcomed by Turin’s Mayor Stefano Lo Russo and Prefect Raffaele Ruberto. The superintendents of many of Italy’s historic opera houses were also in attendance, including Francesco Giambrone of the Rome Opera,  Claudio Orazi of the Carlo Felice Theater in Genoa, Marco Betta of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, and Fulvio Macciardi of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna.

In addition to dignitaries and arts leaders, the press flocked to this production in Turin, which will later be produced at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Sicily; all performances in Turin are completely sold out. “In Muti’s interpretation, [the opera’s famous arias have] become mysteriously transparent, with a balance between voices and orchestral texture that have something of the miraculous,” wrote Massimo Bernardini, who saw Muti’s production with director Giorgio Strehler at La Scala 35 years ago. To revisit work under Muti’s baton was one filled with emotion: “emotion for perfection, for the beauty of unparalleled concerted sounds, like a pearl found and recognized again.” Paolo Gallarati of Music Paper said, “You hear everything . . . even the pauses, carefully distributed, create an unusual tension perceptible in the absolute silence of the packed hall held in perpetual amazed expectation. . . . Never has the difference that divides [Don Giovanni] from the Enlightenment and neatness of The Marriage of Figaro been so apparent.”

“This dark [theatrical] vision of the work is accompanied by the superb vision that Maestro Riccardo Muti gives to a score that he has conducted several times and knows like few conductors in the world,” wrote Alessandro Mormile in an article for Connessi all’Opera. “An even metaphysical, iconic sound in perfect formal balance,” he continued: “an Apollonian light” as well as “a veil of shadow that creates an incomparable sound of meditated depth.”

When asked by Castelli for Corriere della Sera what would define his interpretation of the opera in 2022, Muti responded, “In Mozart everything is an inscrutable mystery, and Don Giovanni is one of his most difficult and enigmatic works. Many years have passed since the last time I conducted it in Salzburg. I picked up the score again; I studied it all over again; the foundations remain the same, but experience inevitably enters the interpretation. Don Giovanni is one big race toward the abyss. From beginning to end, even in the most playful moments, the shadow of death looms. It may be that in this respect there will be a greater maturity, perhaps.”