Florentine Opera’s Villainous Don Giovanni

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Image via The Florentine Opera

Don Giovanni - Florentine Opera Company

It’s a season of villains at Florentine Opera, and few operatic bad actors are more notorious than the title character of Don Giovanni. Mozart’s 1787 opera begins in an ominous D minor, and yet the tragedy surrounding the actions of this homicidal libertine is cushioned with notes of farce that never undermine the drama. And the women aren’t mere props in the hands of the male antihero. Tchaikovsky described the vengeful Donna Anna as “the most superb and wonderful human presentation ever depicted in music.”

“He never regrets his choices,” says the Florentine’s general director, Maggey Oplinger, in a video post. Don Giovanni is “just charming enough to keep getting away with it,” “reveling in people’s misery”—until the end.

The libretto by Mozart’s frequent collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte will be sung in its original Italian with English supertitles. The Florentine’s music director and conductor for Don Giovanni, Francesco Milioto, says that “Some of the best Italian operas were written by an Austrian”—Mozart. The composer’s brilliance shines through every passage. Mozart carried the story forward through recitatives, in which a chorus speak their parts in tune, accompanied by a harpsichordist, improvising like a jazz pianist around the emotions of the words. Milioto adds that Mozart was “unafraid” of injecting unusual instrumentation into his operas. In one scene, Giovanni serenades a victim while strumming a mandolin.

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Photo via The Florentine Opera

Richard Ollarsaba - Don Giovanni, Florentine Opera Company

Richard Ollarsaba

In casting Don Giovanni, the Florentine was fortunate in finding an actor-singer known internationally for the title role, Richard Ollarsaba. For Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, the Florentine chose Brittany Renee and Kayleigh Decker. According to Oplinger, their distinctive voices “play nicely off of each other.”

The Florentine Opera performs Don Giovanni October 24-26 at Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Uihlein Hall. For tickets and more information, visit https://www.florentineopera.org/