Tribute to Don Juan by Mozart

After more than a century and a half of slow literary and theatrical management, the figure of Don Juan, a deceiver par excellence, a seducer-actor and the last Christian legend to be created from the European imagination on the eve of modernity, has been embodied in the tragic form of Mozart’s operas. What better city than Prague, a magical, enchanting city, could have the theatrical verve to witness the creation of this character? It was here in Prague that Mozart composed, without hesitation, the overture. From the first few bars, harrowing like an earthquake, the scene is set for a colossal battle: the battle between Don Juan and Death. Death is the corrector of all human misdemeanours. Death makes its entrance at the last, macabre banquet in the form of the stone statue, brings the curtain down on this world and opens up, at the feet of the unrepentant hero, a hellish abyss. Don Juan is sucked up by the metaphysical void of his guilty inconsistency. The echo of this tragic music spans across time: it tells of other chasms opened up on European soil, of other mass seductions that have perished. Since her childhood in Prague Ana Chromy has lived under the spell of that tragic music and since becoming a sculptress she has been aware of the grandeur and torment of having to limit her sonority.

For a long time, Don Juan and all the characters of Mozart’s masterpiece have been knocking at Anna Chromy’s imagination asking to be immortalised forever in a sculpted tableau. Each of the characters has undergone a surreal, symbolic metamorphosis. So the Comendatore, the symbol of justice and mercy has been transformed into a disturbing, seated figure, mournfully stern in this new bodiless existence. He has been reduced to a heavy, threadbare, empty cloak. He is not seeking violent vengeance but rather is exerting a pull, like a hidden magnet, whose attraction is the force of nothing. Don Juan has the body of a harmonious dancer and swordsman upon which Anna Chromy has placed a colt’s head: a thoroughbred stallion, aristocratic, cruel and whose mad galloping up and down the beach render him irresistible to such an extent that it leads him to believe he can seduce death. In one night, Donna Anna experiences the bitter disappointment of happiness lost and the most heinous crime. Bereavement suffocates people with its cloak of darkness. Her father’s clothes: the empty cloak, the torn cloak of death, all suffocate her and make her a prisoner of her unhappy destiny. It is quite the opposite for Donna Elvira. In her, disappointed passion explodes in all its devastating ardour. The final bursts of the tragedy bring her beautiful, naked body out into the light: unarmed grace lost in the act of giving. The sculptress senses Zerlina’s moral ambiguity and false sweetness. Her face, half cat-like, reveals the artist’s insight and instinct. Even Zerlina’s attractiveness seems to be used more to dominate rather than to be pleasing to the eye, and each of her actions enchants and mesmerizes her easy prey. And then there is Leporello transformed into a proud and ridiculous cockerel: obliging servant, yet always easily shocked by his master’s shameful acts. Don Ottavio is also cast in a dual role as sterile lover and guarantor of a compromised moral order. His body is that of a dancer and grafted onto it is a lion’s head which is overflowing with jealousy and rage that people with power feel when they suddenly discover their own worthlessness. That leaves Masetto whose character undergoes no great metamorphosis. He remains a poor peasant smartly dressed for his wedding, almost totally hidden under the fanciful headdress with bells. He would like the tinkling to be heard as far and wide as possible so that everybody could know that he too has been granted an unexpected day of happiness. But instead there he stands, humiliated, robbed of Zerlina’s love, reduced to silence and subjected to the tyranny of those with power.