Completing the Mozart - Da Ponte Trilogy

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, directed by Vincent Huguet and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, celebrates its premiere on April 2, 2022.

With this opera, Vincent Huguet and Daniel Barenboim complete the Mozart - Da Ponte trilogy, which they developed together and conceived as a coherent cycle that draws an arc from the upheavals of the 1968 movement through the 1980s to the present day. Vincent Huguet places the action of the last part of the trilogy in the present, and transfers it to the world of fashion and fashion photography. For director Vincent Huguet, the three operas also trace the inner development of the characters: in COSÌ FAN TUTTE they are still young and inexperienced, driven into a frenzy of emotions. In LE NOZZE DI FIGARO they try to adjust to their bourgeois lif,e and in DON GIOVANNI they ask themselves existential questions because they feel that things are slipping away from them.

Shortly after the DON GIOVANNI premiere, the Mozart - Da Ponte trilogy can be experienced for the first time as a complete cycle (with two performance series) as part of the FESTTAGE 2022.

The ensemble includes Michael Volle (Don Giovanni), Slávka Zámečníková (Donna Anna), Bogdan Volkov (Don Ottavio), Peter Rose (Commendatore), Elsa Dreisig (Donna Elvira), Riccardo Fassi (Leporello), David Oštrek (Masetto) and Serena Sáenz (Zerlina) and features the Staatsopernchor, rehearsed by Martin Wright, as well as the Staatskapelle Berlin. The stage design was by Aurélie Maestre, the costumes by Clémence Pernoud, the lighting design by Irene Selka, and the videography by Robert Pflanzen.

For the first time, Daniel Barenboim is staging all three of Mozart's Da Ponte operas at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden with just one director. Before that, from 1999 to 2001, he had musically realized a Mozart - Da Ponte cycle, with LE NOZZE DI FIGARO (1999) and DON GIOVANNI (2000) directed by Thomas Langhoff, and with COSÌ FAN TUTTE staged by Doris Dörrie in 2001. Another premiere of DON GIOVANNI followed in 2007 with Peter Mussbach as director and in 2012 DON GIOVANNI again, directed by Claus Guth, as a transfer of a production of the Salzburg Festival to the Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater.