Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. “Here,” it says, “the dead teach the living.”
At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. “It’s a requiem,” Serebrennikov said in an interview, “for all of us.”
His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of “Don Giovanni,” a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem.
That work was left unfinished at Mozart’s death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni’s soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites.
“The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,” Serebrennikov said. “It was written, like ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.”
Serebrennikov’s production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni’s funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a “dramma giocoso”: “funny tragedy,” Serebrennikov said, “the mixture of all genres, all intentions.”
Hubert Zapior, who sings the title role, said in an interview that the process of working on a Serebrennikov show involves “struggle” against preconceptions and the expected. The reward, he said, is getting to “make the character new, and interesting, giving it a whole new quality.”
James Gaffigan, who took up the music directorship of the Komische Oper in 2023, said, “I never would have taken this job at this house if I didn’t like these sorts of things.” Referring to the liberties the production takes with “Don Giovanni,” he added: “Would I choose to do it all the time? Not necessarily. But when you have someone as brilliant as Kirill, I want to make this work.” (As if to illustrate the point, Gaffigan’s office is decorated with a large red neon sign that says “Yes.”)
Serebrennikov sought to broaden Don Giovanni’s tastes as a seducer. To that end, Donna Elvira has been transformed into Don Elviro, sung by the male soprano Bruno de Sá. That role, a character often written off as a harridan, requires ferocious energy and includes both sustained high singing in two enormously difficult solo arias as well as low notes in ensemble singing.
“It’s a weird range for any soprano, or mezzo-soprano,” de Sá said. “But I think I’ve never had this deep a connection with a character. He’s so misunderstood. He just has a broken heart.”
In a traditional production, de Sá would readily go on as Elvira in drag, the way that mezzo-sopranos strap down their chests to play trouser roles. “But the fact that it’s a man in this show brings something else,” he said. The Catalog Aria, in which a mourning Elvira learns from Leporello about his master’s many conquests, “becomes a whole different universe.”
“But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a man, or a woman, or a trans person,” he added. “Human emotions are always there.”
Gaffigan said that the idea works for the opera. “How great is it that Don Giovanni’s not just seducing women, he’s seducing everyone?” he said. “This is not a check box to say, ‘Let’s do something crazy.’”
Critics have mostly agreed. In Die Deutsche Bühne, Joachim Lange described the “casually irreverent creativity” of Serebrennikov and the production, writing that the show “sounds more cerebral than it appears onstage” and that “Serebrennikov manages to tease out the humor of the whole thing in almost every scene.” Ulrich Lange, writing in the Tagesspiegel, praised de Sá’s “heart-piercing” singing and the orchestra’s “sharp Mozart sound.”
The Komische Oper, predicated like all repertory companies on the uneasy relationship between the living and the dead, is on track to sell 92 percent of its tickets this season, an enviable figure for any house. In 2024, it was named Opera House of the Year at the International Opera Awards in Munich.
But the state of Berlin, which is the house’s largest funder by far, is sharply cutting culture spending, threatening the ongoing renovation of the company’s longtime home theater and its annual operating budget.
This season, those cuts have already led to the cancellation of one premiere, of an East German operetta adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” In Serebrennikov’s production, Leporello holds up a sign in the second act of “Don Giovanni” dryly noting that a tenor’s aria “was unfortunately cut due to the slashing of Berlin’s culture budget.” On opening night, audience members cheered and applauded.
“We’re not safe in any way, shape or form,” Gaffigan said. “We’re fighting for our survival. From year to year, we don’t know what’s going to happen.” In an emailed statement in German, Christopher Suss, a spokesman for the city’s cultural department, said that “there will be no halt to construction” on the house’s renovation project and emphasized that “the closure of this unique opera house is out of the question.”
He wouldn’t comment on further cuts because the city’s budget is in the process of being negotiated. On Friday, Berlin’s top culture politician, Joe Chialo, resigned his post; his resignation letter laid out his opposition to forthcoming planned cuts that, he warned, would “lead to the imminent closure of nationally renowned cultural institutions.”
“I have never seen anything like it, where a company is doing so well, and we’re terrified for our own existence,” Gaffigan said. “Doing as well as we are doing, I thought the Komische Oper would always be there. And one night you wake up and realize, ‘Maybe not.’”
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