Director's note: Robert Falls on "Don Giovanni"

When I first began work on this production of Don Giovanni in 2013, I certainly never imagined that I would have the opportunity to return to it twice more. One of the pleasures — and surprises — of revisiting a great work is discovering how remarkably malleable it can be. The notes of the score remain the same, the words remain the same, and yet the opera somehow changes. Or perhaps we change, and consequently hear and see different things in it. Every time I return to Don Giovanni, it reveals something different.

Mozart and Da Ponte called the opera a dramma giocoso — “humorous drama” — and that contradiction remains essential to me. It begins with attempted sexual assault and murder and ends with a man being dragged into hell. In between, it can be uproariously funny. Farce gives way to terror; erotic comedy turns suddenly cruel; moments of extraordinary beauty coexist with appalling behavior. It is funny and yet not funny, often almost simultaneously. Mozart never allows us the comfort of remaining in a single emotional world.

That was one reason I originally placed the production in Spain in the 1920s, a period poised uneasily between an older social order and the modern world. Giovanni belongs naturally to such a landscape. He possesses wealth, position, and enormous freedom of movement, but he also has the glamour and velocity of a new kind of celebrity. He enters a room and alters its temperature.

I have never thought of Giovanni simply as the charming rake or lovable libertine of theatrical tradition. He is a monster. But — and this is crucial — he is a seductive monster. His charisma is real. So are his wit, his vitality, his appetite, and his astonishing capacity to live entirely in the present tense. If he were merely repellent, the opera would be much simpler and considerably less disturbing. Mozart gives him an almost irresistible life force even as Da Ponte shows us the human wreckage left behind him.

The three women who encounter Giovanni are consequently not variations on the same victim. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina respond to him in profoundly different ways. Anna seeks justice. Zerlina is attracted, frightened, and finally able to protect herself. Elvira may be the most complicated of all: furious at Giovanni, humiliated by him, determined to expose him — and still emotionally bound to him. Mozart gives each of them an independent musical and psychological life.

And then there is Leporello. Each time I return to the opera, I find myself increasingly fascinated by his predicament. He knows exactly what Giovanni is. He condemns him, enables him, envies him, profits from him, and repeatedly threatens to leave — yet stays. He is comic, but his complicity is not. Through Leporello the opera asks an uncomfortable question that extends far beyond Giovanni himself: What responsibility belongs to those who recognize destructive behavior and nevertheless continue to serve it?

Finally, Giovanni is offered something almost no one else in the opera receives: an unmistakable opportunity to change. He refuses. Whether we understand that refusal as extraordinary defiance, absolute narcissism, or simply an incapacity to imagine any existence other than his own, Mozart refuses to soften it. Giovanni goes to his death insisting on remaining Giovanni.

More than a decade after I first entered this extraordinary opera, I find myself less interested in solving its contradictions than in allowing them to remain alive. Comedy and horror, attraction and revulsion, freedom and responsibility continually collide. Perhaps that is why Don Giovanni survives every attempt to explain it — and why every time I return to it, it reveals something different.