No laughing matter | 25 October 2012

About two of the operas I saw in Leeds this week there is a serious question as to whether or not they are comedies. The third, Gounod’s Faust, is clearly not meant to be; I’ll be writing about it next week. The new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Alessandro Talevi is jokey and fast — or, anyway, the arias and ensembles are fast, the recitatives less so — but it’s not particularly funny, and what humour there is would certainly not have been available to da Ponte and Mozart: peasants rocking and rolling in the finale to Act I, for instance.

Talevi alternates the main action with Punch and Judy scenes, too, in a traditional little box with curtains, an idea of little merit and casting no light on the action or what kind of thing the body of the opera is. There is, in any case, the matter of whether an opera that begins with an attempted rape and a killing, and which ends with the removal of the anti-hero to hell, though not necessarily the Christian hell, with great tragic numbers en route, such as Donna Anna’s two arias, Elvira’s extremely painful appearance on the balcony (painful as much for the audience as for her), and which contains very few laughter-provoking scenes, as Figaro and even Così certainly do, can be called a comedy.