There is no Bildung here. Even with the shaking-up of this noumenal intrusion, no one is any the wiser, any the better, for what they’ve undergone. They’ve only learned their little reality-check life lessons, just like the Count and Countess or the Così couples. The  exception is Elvira. She has evolved, she has sensed the moral and mortal stakes involved, and with that realization has started a new life that can be seen as either a sad, lonely withdrawal or the beginning of a spiritual journey. For the others, marriage is, as always, the happy end, and while in Zauberflöte the unions mark a new and presumably more enlightened era, in Giovanni they only signal a restoration of the status quo ante, its class structure intact and everyone content with his or her place in it. And it would be perfectly correct to name this structure “patriarchal,” though as between Anna and Ottavio, Zerlina and Masetto, I wouldn’t wager much on the men winning many war-of-the-sexes skirmishes.

I’ve been writing about Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, not Ivo van Hove’s. His is contemporary in the always-in-fashion mode, since, as we know, nothing of import happened before us, or is likely to happen after us. He avowedly doesn’t want there to be anything sexy about his Giovanni, or anything comic about his Leporello, so there isn’t. They’re just a couple of black-suited thugs, the clear indications of both the verbal and musical text to the contrary notwithstanding. Also missing is the uom di sasso, the Stone Guest (ditto, bigtime). In the opening scene, I would have wanted a sharper thrust-and-parry from the violins for the duel, except that there is no duel: the Commendatore has fists raised in the I-dare-you-to-cross-that-line pose till the Don pulls a pistol and plugs him. In the later scenes he turns up as his quotidian self, very bloody but not at all “metaphysical.” I won’t go on. The set, by Jan Versweyveld (who also did the There Shall Be No Day lighting), is a group of buildings (“timeless,” but European) that crowd in upon a street that doesn’t quite widen into a piazza down front. This serves as the playing area for all the scenes, occasionally supplemented by appearances in the galleries above. This puts us into a rather cramped version of the Space, not a Place, school of Postist stage design, though it does have the considerable virtue of helping the voices get out into the house.

When all this has run its course, van Hove pulls off a coup at the end that I found touching. As the Don bargains himself into much worse than “ewige Nacht,” there is first one of the best uses I’ve seen of projections, as an Inferno-esque spectacle engulfs the scene. Then, at the close, we are vouchsafed the sight of a sun-drenched row of Mediterranean housefronts, flower boxes at their windows—for a moment, quite breathtaking. For van Hove, I’m sure this was the lifting of the nightmare world the Don has trapped us all in; it served that purpose. For me, it was a reminder of how much more there is to this great work than the director chose to show us. It served that purpose, too.