This morning, as I was cleaning up my Carthage e-mailbox* I came across an email from two months ago with a link to photos of this spring’s opera workshop production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I gave these photos a quick glance at the time, but today was my first opportunity to really take some time with them, and I’m really glad I did. The pictures put a big, wide smile on my face …. even if they also gave me a throbbing tension headache …. because they were a potent reminder of the immense satisfaction as well as the mind-boggling stress that came with mounting something as ambitious as Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Even under the best of circumstances, Don Giovanni was a daunting undertaking for Carthage’s opera workshop. It’s a long opera- full of very difficult music- with a story that includes two assault scenes, a sword fight in which one of the combatants is killed, and a final scene where the title character is supposed to be dragged to hell by demons. (It’s not exactly The Marriage of Figaro!) But if all that wasn’t worrisome enough, I faced the prospect of confronting these challenges without my longtime operatic partner in crime, Matt Boresi, who was the stage director for Carthage’s productions of The Marriage of Figaro (twice), The Magic Flute, The Elixir of Love, The Beggar’s Opera, Gianni Schicchi, Suor Angelica, Il Tabarro, three galas devoted to Menotti, Offenbach, and Gilbert & Sullivan, two original pastiches celebrating the works of Mozart and Handel, plus our own opera, Black September. It was a partnership I absolutely loved, and my highest hope was that we would remain operatic collaborators until we were both getting around on walkers and swapping advice about denture adhesives. In other words, I hoped we would keep doing this together forever. But then came the news late in the spring of 2017 that Matt – whose position at Carthage was part-time – had been offered and had accepted a marvelous full-time position at a prep school down in Illinois. It was a day that was all but inevitable, but it was still a sad shock for someone like me who really doesn’t have a restless bone in his body and prefers nothing to change aside from the flavor-of-the-day at Culver’s. This was actually a wrenching turn of events for me, both professionally and personally, and it made the prospect of tackling Don Giovanni – which we had already planned as our next opera – downright terrifying for me.
But more than that … I was really sad for our seniors … Allie Kurkjian, Angela Yu, Austin Merschdorf, and Matt Burton … who had worked with Matt every year since coming to Carthage, and I thought it was inconceivable that their last opera at Carthage would be done without him. That’s why I hatched the admittedly crazy idea – to which Matt agreed – of having him play do at least most of the staging of this production, though he would only be able to join us for a handful of evenings in the spring. It would be a way to keep Matt in the mix, and I knew that he would come up with imaginative ways for us to contend with the special challenges of this story. (And he did, as he always does.)
Filling in the rest of the gaps was a relatively recent Carthage grad (and a former voice student of mine) named Tommy Novak, who has proven to be one of our busiest and most successful alums as both an actor and director. He was an indispensable help in all kinds of matters, including the staging of the sword fight and some other complicated matters. He came in with very little operatic experience but with tons of theatrical smarts as well as energy to burn, and I appreciated the way he stepped into a very challenging situation and did as well as he did.
There was one other factor that made this production both incredibly fun for me- but still more complicated. Once we had cast all of the principal roles in the opera, we still had three talented female singers who wanted to be part of the opera – but who would have had nothing to do. We had faced a similar dilemma when we did The Marriage of Figaro, which led me to concoct a scenario in which two maids in the count’s castle, while scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchen, gossip about recent events – which serves as the framework within which the opera itself is sung. It was not only a means to involve a couple of talented women who otherwise would not have had a place in the production – but was also a handy way to be able to cut some of the recitative by having these two women explain what had just happened or what was coming next.
I decided to do a similar thing with Don Giovanni, and I have Tommy Novak to thank for coming up with the initial idea. The opera ends with the title character being dragged off to hell by the man that he murdered in the first scene of the opera. (The statue that was made of him after his death comes back to life- and it makes for one of the most terrifying opera scenes of all time.) Tommy suggested that we start the opera with that final image of Don Giovanni being dragged to hell – and have the opera play out from there. It was both an inspired and inspiring idea, and I found my creative juices immediately stimulated- which is one of the best feelings one can have.
(this is the poster designed for us by Carthage’s Tianna Conway)
Our scenario ended up being this: Right after the dark, ominous opening measures of the overture, we saw two people emerge – a mysterious figure in black dragging a bound man behind him. They stop, and the figure in black sings “Not much further, you wretched villain. Your hellish new home awaits you… A place of torment and tears, where you will suffer for endless, numberless years. And all your misery is fully deserved. Death, at long last, shall be served!” They are stopped by three mysterious women <sort of like angels, except that they’re not exactly heavenly beings> who want to know why they are approaching the gates of hell. When they see that the bound man is the legendary Don Giovanni (whom they call “history’s most famous Casanova”) they demand to know what series of events has led him to such ruin. To answer their question, the opera itself is then performed, with these figures offering their own comments from time to time. (As with Figaro, they could help clarify some of the more confusing plot points in the opera and it also made it possible for certain cuts in the score to be made.) What made them different from the scrubwomen in Figaro (who offered up spoken dialogue that Matt and I wrote for them) is that these Three Women From Beyond sang music …. which I had to compose for them. I did my best to write it in a style that would fold pretty well into the rest of the score; I didn’t try to make it sound like Mozart, but it also didn’t sound like it was from an entirely universe. (A lot of what they sang was basically in the style of accompanied recitative- but I also composed for them two songs with the music drawn directly from two famous arias from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The reason I did that was because Mozart himself quotes Figaro in the final scene because that earlier opera had been a sensational success in Prague, which is what prompted the opera house in Prague commission this new opera from him. Creating two more musical quotes from Figaro felt appropriate, even if it was in a way that would have left Mozart speechless.) Of course, tied up in all of this was the very tricky matter of deciding exactly what in the score should be cut and what should be retained – and how best to plug those gaps. I can’t begin to even calculate the time it took to figure all of this out, but it proved to be an invigorating challenge.
And on top of all of that “fun” was the matter of putting together a special score for the young men who would operate the supertitles – the projected English translation to help the audience follow the action. Because this opera represented such an immense undertaking for our singers- and because several of them were incredibly busy preparing their own solo senior recitals- I decided that I needed to create the supertitles myself … which meant typing each and every supertitle into Google Slides (all 479 of them, as it turns out) and then preparing a specially-marked score so our supertitles operators would be able to follow along and know exactly when to advance to the next slide. It’s the kind of thing that the average audience member does not begin to consider or notice (unless something goes wrong) but it’s absolutely indispensable if you want the audience to be able to follow along and fully understand the story.
We had both the fall and spring semesters to work our way through the score- which, by the way, was sung in the original Italian- and I can say with complete certainty that most of our marvelous singers have never worked so hard in their lives as they worked on this score. And I know that I have never worked harder either. Not even Black September, the opera that Matt and I created completely from scratch, was as hard as this was. Part of the challenge was that the actual staging could not be done within a conventional time frame but only in occasional evening sessions when we could get the schedules of Matt and members of the cast to align with those evenings when the chapel was open for us … a logistical nightmare, to put it mildly. At some point, we realized (especially after a couple of concerned cast members came to me) that we simply couldn’t manage to stage the entire opera start to finish within the time available to us; we might have been able to scramble to get everything staged, but there just wasn’t going to be time for the cast to gain confidence in the staging and be able to polish up the details. The decision was made for us to do act one fully staged- while act two was done in concert format. It was first and foremost a necessary concession, but I think it was also a valuable experience for the students since some of them may find themselves singing in a concert performance of an opera someday. (How one embodies a character and creates real theater in a concert setting is no small challenge.) I think we were living up to that now-famous line uttered again and again by Tim Gunn on the television show Project Runway: MAKE IT WORK!
We certainly learned the full meaning of those three simple words when it came to the second of our two performances. The night before, Jordan Keller- our Commendatore – had been rather seriously under the weather but still managed to deliver an impressive performance. The next day, Jordan could barely get out of bed, and it quickly became clear that he could not possibly sing that afternoon’s performance. So …. our Masetto, Michael Walker (yet another senior but a relative newcomer to opera) donned Jordan’s Commendatore costume and mimed his performance (including the crucial sword fight in scene one) while I sang the Commendatore’s music from the piano! (I sure am glad that it wasn’t our tenor, Cory Pollard, who got sick! Stepping in for him would have been an entirely different matter.) I couldn’t have been prouder of Michael for handling all of that so well. We made it work, and I think Tim Gunn would have been proud.
I know that I came away from this production with a very strange mix of euphoria and exhaustion. The exhaustion was thanks to the huge amount of work involved for all of us, coupled with all kinds of stresses and tensions that come with an undertaking this huge, especially when you’re undertaking it in unconventional fashion. For me, a big part of that exhaustion was in not having Matt alongside me in the same way as he had been in the past. It was a lonelier experience …. and never more so for the dress rehearsal and opening night performance, when neither Matt nor Tommy could be there. It was just little old me- feeling very little and very old in the shadow of this formidable challenge. But here’s where the euphoria comes in: I could not have been prouder of our students for the way in which they shouldered this responsibility and delivered a truly fine performance. I was happy that our seniors could go out with such a bang (several of them doing the finest singing of their young lives) and that our younger singers (including several who had never sung in an opera before) could be part of and contribute to such a rich experience. Opera is an exceptionally challenging art form- and there are millions of things that can go wrong. I’m reminded of the final challenge in a recent episode of The Great British Baking Show, in which each of the three finalists had to create a Queen’s Picnic: 12 small sausage pies, 12 scones, 12 fruit tarts, 12 mini quiches, plus a splendidly decorated chocolate celebration cake … in five hours. It was a ridiculously complex challenge- but all three somehow managed to accomplish it in splendid fashion- and at the end, they fell into each other arms in a state of utter exhaustion, immense relief, and well-earned pride.
That was our Don Giovanni. It was complicated and frustrating and disconcerting … and exciting and gratifying and illuminating. And even though I feel like it almost killed me, I will always be grateful to have had the experience. And I hope that these exceptionally talented young people feel the same way about it …. grateful for the experience itself, harrowing though it may have been, and grateful to have shared it with each other.
Here are a few more photos from Carthage’s Don Giovanni. This is a closer look at the costumes, rented from Miller & Campbell in Milwaukee. It’s amazing how costumes can make such an enormous difference in a singing-actor grasping the essence of the character they’re portraying.
Opera never packs them in, nowadays- and I’m pretty much used to that by now – but it was still hard to see such small audiences turn out for our two performances. We had a grand total of about 80 people come to see the opera. By contrast, Carthage’s main stage musical – a spectacular production of Into the Woods – going on at the same time, was essentially sold out for all six of its performances, which means that well over 2,000 people saw Into the Woods.
When one confronts those kind of numbers, it’s hard not to feel like you’re riding in a sputtering tug boat while the rest of the world is steaming away in a sleek and spectacular ocean liner. On the other hand, there is something strangely invigorating about being devoted to something that most people just don’t seem to ‘get.’ I remember one writer talking about “the Excitement of the Uncommon” and I think that touches on part of what fuels an opera person’s devotion to their craft. At any rate, the people who came to Don Giovanni seemed to really like it- and I was especially grateful that Cameron Swallow, the wife of Carthage’s president, saw the opera and had such warm, appreciative things to say about it afterwards. (She is a very experienced singer.)
One of the most dramatic moments in the entire opera comes in the last scene, while Don Giovanni is enjoying a lavish private feast in his home. There is a terrifying knock at the door- it’s supposed to be a thundering sound that is punctuated by the musical weight of the full orchestra (if one has an orchestra on hand) that turns out to be generated by the stony fist of the statue of the Commendatore- magically alive and coming to summon Don Giovanni. We have no budget for much at all in the way of special effects, but I knew that this was a moment of supreme importance and we needed to make it as dramatic as possible. Then I remembered that back in the fall Carthage’s wind orchestra had played an amazing new work, this is most certainly true, by Jim Stephenson in honor of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s reformation … and there is a point in the score when a percussionist is to swing a huge hammer to generate a mighty sound meant to represent Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of his church in Wittenberg. I went to Dr. James Ripley, the director of bands at Carthage, who had already greatly assisted me in assembling some wind musicians to play in the final scene – and asked him if we could possibly borrow that hammer. It required a bit of a search, but the hammer was eventually found- and Laura Smith, who was also our Donna Elvira, volunteered to do the actual hammering in performance. (The hammer blows are very specifically notated in the score.) I’m not exactly sure how it sounded out in the audience, but from my vantage point (which was about a foot and a half away) the sound was ear-splitting …. and truly terrifying!
There are two reasons why I had no time to write this blog back in the spring. One was: Don Giovanni. But the other reason was: Mabel, the golden retriever puppy who came to live with us in early March. There is nothing like an energetic puppy to turn your life upside down and absorb every bit of your spare time and energy. But Mabel did make it to two Don Giovanni rehearsals- one in the choir room (less than a week after she came to us) and the other up in Siebert Chapel. It’s a little early to tell for sure just what Mabel thinks of opera … but hearing it didn’t make her bark, growl, or pee …. which is certainly a positive sign!
Let me end with the smiling faces of our marvelous cast. It wasn’t easy – and mistakes were made (especially by yours truly) – but we made it! And I could not be prouder of them for the way they gave themselves up to this remarkable masterpiece. (I’m sorry this photo is minus Jordan Keller, our Commendatore. This was taken after the Saturday performance, which he missed because of illness.) It does my heart good to see such genuine joy on those faces.
*My Carthage email inbox has more than 29,000 unread messages in it. Yikes.