Ever since the death (of natural causes) of the 1957 Herbert Graf/Eugene Berman/Karl Böhm production, the Met has had difficulty finding a Don Giovanni worth keeping in the repertory. I thought rather more highly than did most of the version directed by Marthe Keller, but it gathered too few advocates to stick around. For that matter, sticking around in a given company’s repertory seems less and less the point; “once around the top,” and thanks for sharing, is the pattern that’s been emerging over the past 15 or 20 years. I have faith that the pattern will hold with van Hove’s effort, but maybe not, since it is shared with only one other company, the Opéra National de Paris. Also shared—with several of his directorial colleagues—is van Hove’s view that we are in a world where the sun will rise no more. They may well be right, but meanwhile we are subjected to a Don Giovanni that is relentlessly dark and joyless.^(I) Van Hove wants the opera to be all about power, or, actually, “power structures.” That the exercise of power is a thematic element of this opera I would not contest for a moment, but van Hove insists it’s all about the power, and nothing but the power. That’s what Mozart wrote this music for, music that alternately mocks, defies, seduces, charms, chastises, explores and reveals, and ultimately summons us to something terrifyingly noumenal—”power structures?” As van Hove observes in a program interview, Don Giovanni  “becomes a metaphysical opera.” That’s unlike Figaro or Così, which settle all accounts in their everyday worlds. But it is very like Zauberflöte. In both that work and Don Giovanni, the characters’ strivings are set in the context of noumenal forces at work, and the intervention of the morally benign among them is required to blow away their malign, disruptive counterparts. In both cases, the malignant ones have possessed a magic of their own, an abnormal power to deceive, seduce, and undermine. Whereas the Queen of the Night, though, is herself a part of the more-than-real, Giovanni is only a mortal, and so his defiance, a mano a mano with God,  takes on a heroic aspect. A certain admiration lingers with us, a whiff of wistfulness at the banishment of this erotic free spirit from the world—and, I think, a restless disbelief that it’s really gone for good.