The man who women did not love

Knowledgeable voices claim that Cherubino and Don Giovanni are the same person. The page who won the hearts of all the women in The Marriage of Figaro returned from the wars corrupted and disenchanted, transformed into the amoral and dissolute libertine who - according to his servant Leporello- listed more than 1000 conquests in his personal catalogue.

Each one responded to his basic instinct beneath the sky of Sevilla. In Sevilla the adolescent discovered his irresistible predisposition, in Sevilla the ground to hell opened to punish the impertinence of the libertine. Between one opera and the other, the gentle light which illuminated The Marriage of Figaro has become the dead of night in Don Giovanni, the perfumed air of a patio in Sevilla is poisoned among gravestones and pantheons.

If as a man, Don Juan is lamentable, as a myth he is irresistible. Mozart and Da Ponte were not the first, but they were decisive in the crystallization of the character. So much so, that any other view must be measured with the opera that Prague applauded in its 1787 premiere, and which the audience in Vienna in 1788 was unable to grasp in its version with a moral.

The idea of Stage Director Cecilia Ligorio, which met with success at the Cologne Opera, focuses on the elusive identity of the character who can only be defeated by the powers of the beyond. And by the supreme dignity of the women who Don Juan ridicules in his descent to hell. Women who, although they appear in his catalogue, loved neither the conquistador nor the man.

Dramma giocoso in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte
Premiere on 29 October 1787 at the National Theatre in Prague