Don Giovanni on Mars by the gloriously disruptive Barrie Kosky

Kosky’s bleak landscape was a spoiler alert: "This ain’t going to end well”.

Hot news! Perseverance Rover has found opera on Mars! Never mind boring, dodgy evidence of fossilised microbes in dried-up riverbed rocks. This was conclusive. Tenors, Baritones, Sopranos and Mezzos in plain sight, spotted stumbling across a rock-strewn, desolate Jezero Crater. Broadcast in real time HD to Vienna.

That 19^th century canal canard, Martians as infrastructure engineers, may have proved a disappointing illusion, but as the curtain rose in Vienna’s packed Staatsoper house, here was incontrovertible evidence of life on the red planet. And the Martians were little green opera lovers.

Barrie Kosky, the effervescent Australian director, had set Mozart and Da Ponte’s 18^th century masterpiece, Don Giovanni on an alien, relentlessly grey, rocky landscape, punctuated by an upward thrust of jagged crystalline structures and hot water pools. Bleak? You could have been in Ardrossan. But it was certainly Mars. Kosky is unfamiliar with Ardrossan.

Call me old fashioned, but I think 17^th century Seville, the original setting for the opera, featured boring things – like houses, bustling streets, castles, gardens, even a cemetery where a murdered Commendatore’s statue might come to life. A balcony where unwary Donnas could be serenaded and seduced by lusting Dons.

Don Giovanni may be set successfully in a different period. It often is. But when stripped of all reference to the societal context in which the action unfolds, the moral tale of the opera is rendered meaningless.

Kosky, a director who frequently occupies alternative planets, justified the setting. He wanted to focus on the moral bleakness of the Tirso de Molina1630 play, El birlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The trickster of Seville and the stone guest) upon which the opera draws heavily.

But for the audience, the delight of Don Giovanni lies in observing the moral ambiguities that play out during the performance. The ambivalent relationship between the Don and Donna Anna, who is raped at the opening of the opera; the tension between the peasant Masetto, betrothed to flirty Zerlina, who the Don is determined to seduce; the hapless Donna Elvira, deceived by the Don, but unable to abandon him entirely.

Even the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father, murdered by the Don when he rushes to his daughter’s defence, turns up for dinner as an avenging statue, but gives Giovanni one last chance to repent.

In other words, everything is up for grabs. Nothing is resolved until the last minute. We, the audience, should be kept on the edge of our seats until the final triumphant ensemble has sung, after Don Giovanni is condemned to hellfire. Only then do we find resolution.

Kosky’s bleak landscape was a spoiler alert. It screams on first sight “This ain’t going to end well”. I really don’t need to know that at the outset of this opera. For those who don’t know how it starts, unfolds, and ends, a convenient Glyndebourne synopsis can be found here.

I have two other major gripes. In the opening scene between Donna Anna and Don Giovanni, it is essential to the plot that the Don be in disguise. Anna will later claim she thought the man entering her room was her fiancé, Don Ottavio. Oh yeah??

To start with Don Giovanni offers her help in tracking down dad’s killer. Himself! It is only well into the action that Anna recognises the Don’s voice as being that of the masked man in her bedroom.

That moment is the hinge upon which the whole plot swings. If Don Giovanni was in plain sight from the start the story just doesn’t work. It is rendered incomprehensible. Unless you make believe Donna Anna had her eyes shut during hanky panky. Which she didn’t.

Then in the final act Don Giovanni invites the Commendatore’s statue for dinner. Most readers so invited would reasonably expect food, set upon, perhaps, a table. Even chairs would be a possibility. Perseverance spotted none of these on planet Kosky. His Don Giovanni dined out by nibbling on a clenched fist, simulating a chicken drumstick.

Time and time again the story as told in the libretto – which should be any director’s bible – was disregarded by Kosky. We were watching characters singing words that were not in sync with their actions.

Lord preserve us from any La bohème Kosky attempts. Your tiny hand is scorching, would probably be his concept for that totemic first act aria. For those unfamiliar with Puccini, Mimi’s hand is, conventionally, frozen.

Meanwhile on Mars, the corpse of the Commendatore wasn’t even offered a canapé. And there were no leftovers for Leporello. The whole ceremonial set up of the dinner party which the Commendatore and Don Giovanni will churn into a battle ground was missing.

I had travelled to Vienna for three reasons. Kosky was not one of them. Because I have not been to the city for far too long; Donna Anna was being sung by British soprano, Louise Alder; and Donna Elvira was Candian mezzo soprano Emily d’Angelo. Both are steadily making their mark in Europe and America, but I had never heard them singing together, nor in these roles.

Vienna, and its Staatsoper, was wonderful. Don Giovanni premiered in Prague in 1797, not because Mozart could not get his controversial opera past Vienna’s blue pencil driven censors, but because the heady mixture of sex and politics would not appeal to a Viennese audience. Not a problem today.

Opera of all sorts is alive and well in Vienna. The Staatsoper shakes a defiant fist in the faces of those who claim the art form is dying. In the 25/26 season 51 operas will be staged, ranging across the traditional repertoire, but not shying away from innovative works, such as Alexander Raskatov’s Animal Farm.

That is a remarkable achievement for any house. To put it in perspective New York’s Metropolitan Opera will stage only 18 operas in season 25/26 – and shall be dark during the month of February. Then, consider the following amazing, stark statistics.

New York Metropolitan Opera 18 operas; budget $300m

Vienna Staatsoper 51 operas; budget $151m

Population of New York 8.4m

Population of Vienna 2m

Perhaps it’s time that Peter Gelb, Managing Director of the Met, which clocked up a whacking $40m budget deficit last year, visited planet Vienna and took home some of their secret sauce. At least some Vienna Kreme from the Café Schwarzenberg.

Those other two reasons for the trip, Alder and d’Angelo, proved powerful allies in their separate trysts with the dodgy Don. They both have passion for performance rooted in their DNA. Alder proved that beyond measure in her Cleopatra in Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare (Handel) last year, as did d’Angelo as the hot shot F16 pilot, Jess in the Met’s 24/25 season opener, Grounded (Jeanine Tesori).

Not their fault that the haughtiness of their characters was somewhat compromised by being forced to stagger from rock to rock on Kosky’s vertiginous set.

Barrie Kosky can be gloriously disruptive and, when on form, deliver a libretto with punch. His Der Rosenkavalier for Bayerische Staatsoper is a case in point.

But when he talks dismissively in an interview with Sir Anthony Pappano about an opera character being eventually “banished to Africa, somewhere on the Amazon” it must raise some concern about his interest in the detail of the artwork in hand. Moi? Self-indulgent? This Vienna production is really Don Giovanni by Barrie Kosky, not Mozart.

And another, very sad, thing.

Martin Graham who founded Longborough Festival Opera, using a converted chicken shed, with his wife Lizzie thirty years ago, in the grounds of their family home, died on Easter Monday, aged 83.

For me, falling down the Graham family rabbit hole of Longborough in 2023 has been a recent but life enhancing experience. Chicken shed Wagner, performed to exacting Bayreuth standards just about sums up the triumph of Martin and Lizzie’s “impossible” dream.

Martin’s death will have touched many hearts. The torch he lit in the Cotswolds will be nourished by Polly, assisted by the fantastic Longborough team and the top-notch artists – who have fallen down the same rabbit hole as I!

Martin Graham leaves a rich legacy.