A serial seducer meets his supernatural invoice — with full orchestral backing.
Mozart's second collaboration with the mercurial librettist Lorenzo da Ponte is among the very blackest of black comedies. Glyndebourne welcomes back the winning team of director Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown, while the music is conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. In the title role, the bass-baritone Gerald Finley, joined by Luca Pisaroni, Kate Royal and the young Russian soprano Anna Samuil.
Direction
Kent's staging makes hell feel like a corporate collapse.
Acting
Finley's Giovanni: charm so weaponized it should be regulated.
Score
Jurowski conducts Mozart's jokes like they're death threats.
Director
Peter Maniura
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Gerald Finley performed this role over 100 times; by 2010, his Giovanni had evolved from charming to genuinely menacing.
Da Ponte based the libretto on a 17th-century Spanish legend, but Mozart's addition of the dinner scene—Giovanni eating while hell approaches—remains one of opera's darkest jokes.
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