Opera Look-In Michelle Cross Fenty, Honory Chair
Don Giovanni By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Educator’s Guide
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE Opera offers a unique teaching opportunity – to explore music through many different disciplines from literature and drama to history and art. This guide and the accompanying CDs prepare students for the Opera Look-In and can also be used as stand-alone classroom activities and resources for teachers. For applicable National Standards, please contact Washington National Opera at 202.448.3465 or at education@dc-opera.org. Your students received a student guide to help them prepare for the Opera Look-In. The student guide provides musical and historical information about Don Giovanni. Additionally, there are challenging questions incorporated into the student guide to assist your students’ critical thinking skills. These questions can lead to in-class discussions or provide topics for classroom assignments.
WHAT WILL YOU SEE? Based on the legend of Don Juan with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni takes center stage for the 2007 Opera Look-In. You and your students will experience demonstrations of musical and technical special effects, as well as a performance of scenes with full staging, costumes, and orchestra. The performance will be sung in Italian with English supertitles projected above the stage. The estimated running time for the Opera Look-In: Don Giovanni is 50 minutes with no intermission.
DON JUAN The story of Don Juan is centered around a fictional character who was a nobleman during the 18th century in Seville, Spain. Although it is not clear where this legendary character originated, during the Golden Age of Spanish drama, he is first documented in a play by Tirso de Molina (the pen name for the Spanish monk Gabriel Téllez). The basic story describes Don Juan, a womanizer, who seduces a young woman of a noble family and kills her father when he attempts to defend his daughter’s honor. Later, Don Juan encounters the dead father’s statue in the cemetery and mockingly invites him to dinner, an invitation the statue accepts. When the statue arrives for dinner, he extends his hand to greet Don Juan and drags him to Hell for his unrepentant sins. Don Juan was always the villain of the story, but his character became more romanticized around Mozart’s time. Lorenzo da Ponte’s close friend, Giacomo Casanova, came to Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni. It is believed that he, an accomplished writer and womanizer himself, offered suggestions to da Ponte as he wrote the libretto for Don Giovanni. History suggests that this contributed to the portrayal of Don Juan as a less villainous character. Since then, Don Juan has become increasingly romanticized into a superhuman character without guilt.