Don Giovanni by Mozart, No (2021/2022), Režisēja Alexander Titel, Diriģents Timur Zangiev, William Lacey, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theater, Moscow, Russia

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart defined the genre of his Don Giovanni as dramma giocoso, that is, "jolly drama". If you do not consider this phrase as a specific genre, it is a perfect oxymoron. Indeed, Don Juan contains more mysteries and contradictions than any other opera. Game and reality, masks and faces, sensuality and cold moralizing are mixed here. It is not clear where one ends and another begins. Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote Don Giovanni for Prague, where the opera premiered in 1787. The people of Prague greeted Mozart's new composition quite passionately. The subsequent production in Vienna did not have such an enthusiastic response. Emperor Joseph II remarked that “Don Juan was too tough” for his crowns. He could hardly have imagined then that attempts to unravel Don Juan would be endless. Today, two and a half centuries after its premiere, Mozart's Don Giovanni still remains an unsolved operatic mystery.