| A Conversation; Peter Brook
on Mozart’s Don Giovanni |
||||
"Music is
a language related to the invisible by which nothingness suddenly is
there in a The following conversation took place on May 7,1998 at Aix-en-Provence, France. Laurent Feneyrou: How wide, in your view, is the gap between Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro? Peter Brook: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and even The Magic Flute have one thing in common: they defy classification. They cannot be summed up in a word or a definition. Not one of these works is entirely "funny," "serious," "frivolous," or "solemn." At the same time, they do share a common element: each one of them is Mozartian. Mozart was the very essence of vitality and this vital exuberance was evident in his everyday life, in his letters and in the little that we know of his conversation. It was the one factor that unified his entire musical output. From the outset, Mozart accumulated a vast range of impressions to do with human life, not only those gathered from the outside, from the observation of other people, but also from the inside scrutiny of his own being. Each and every person is constantly in a state of flux; feelings, images, colors, sensory impressions, theories, thoughts, ideas, all these are constantly present. They remain in a form that is hardly accessible to the individual in question. The composer, however, is able to capture these impressions and express them in the shape of vibrations of the utmost delicacy. Mozart's personality displayed in succession despair, the awareness of death, humor, joy, derision, speed of thought, and the ability to see life at one and the same time on the social level and on the cosmic level. Death is a presence. In the face of death, our feeling for life is for a moment unbelievably reinforced. Throughout his music, Mozart constantly comes back to a contemplation of this presence. His compositions in their entirety lie between two poles: the joy of living and awe in the face of death. ... I have received a piece of news which
greatly distresses me, the more so as I gathered from your last letter
that, thank God, you were very well indeed. But now I hear that you
are really ill. I need hardly tell you how greatly I am longing to receive
some reassuring news from yourself. And I still expect it; although
I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for
the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true
goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such
close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his
image is no longer terrifying to me, but it is indeed very soothing
and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity
(you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks
the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting
that—young as I am—I may not live to see another day. Yet
no one of all my acquaintances in my company could say that I am morose
or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator and wish
with all my heart that each one of my fellow creatures could enjoy it. Mozart was free, entirely free when it was a matter of writing or imagining music. In the space of three bars, he could introduce speed, light, derision, tenderness, and a deep sense of tragedy. Let us examine what happens with any good pianist. When any note is played, the musician must relax his body and free himself so that he can attack the following note in an entirely different fashion. A bad actor, under the sway of emotion, launches forth and throughout ten sentences goes on saying the words with exactly the same feeling. What is marvelous in the case of Shakespeare or of Racine is that the subtlety of their writing is such that from one moment to another, feelings change color, sometimes only slightly, at others drastically. The performer has to do the same thing, going immediately from a tragic word to an almost insignificant word, to a word without any importance. To use another analogy, in Don Giovanni, Mozart is somewhat like Chekhov. Chekhov loathed the falsity of overcharged sentiment—he himself was a man of deep feeling. Whenever a character becomes overemotional, he immediately introduces a comic effect in order to break up this emotion. This device is to be found in most all of his plays. But when it seems that the comical atmosphere is about to become permanent, Chekhov introduces a moment of truth, an emotional truth that takes your breath away. In The Cherry Orchard, for example, Varya comes onstage through tears. During the initial rehearsals, the actress began to cry. Chekhov stopped her immediately: "Although I wrote through tears, this wasn't to be taken literally; all it means is that there is a degree of sadness. But if you really cry, you can't simply come out of that a moment later." With Mozart, if you talk about opera buffa, or dramma giocoso, you are introducing distinctions and categories. Such and such a moment is buffo, another is drama. This is not at all the case. Within a phrase, or from one phrase to another, there is freedom of movement. If you do not know the content, you might gain the impression that the music is incredibly gay. But a light and rapid tempo sometimes accompanies a very sad moment, and vice versa. So I believe that you have to approach Mozart in a state of awareness that makes it possible to perceive these transitions, which are inseparable from intimacy. This is what links The Marriage of Figaro to Don Giovanni and even to The Magic Flute. There are two extremes to be avoided, and
once you have escaped from the dangers of these reefs, you are well
on the way to mastering the art of Mozartian navigation. The first consists
in not seeing the depths that lie beneath apparent lightheartedness;
the second one is much more difficult to avoid and it consists in ignoring
this lightheartedness once you have understood the poignancy that can
lie within its magic aspects. Laurent Feneyrou: Beneath the mere entertainment, does Da Ponte reinforce the drama, does he underline the cruelty of the relationships and the bitterness of the situations? And does Mozart distance himself from his librettist? Is his Don Giovanni aware of depravity and the cruel games of desire? Peter Brook: That is a very interesting question, because I think that the answer to it is both yes and no. Da Ponte does not give us the same Don Juan as Molière. Don Giovanni is not the great sinner. He is a man who plays the moment and who, as we see him before us, lives each moment with incredible verve. He doesn't give a damn about the consequences, rather like the great gangsters you see at the cinema. They are often heroes. They kill right and left, before dying themselves at the end of the film. But they are not presented as examples of men who are evil incarnate. Da Ponte writes his comic scenes with extraordinary cruelty. Behind the laughter, the winks exchanged between men, the way he treats the women is very cruel. When Leporello in disguise seduces Donna Elvira once again, the fact that she falls so easily into his arms is a hard and nasty idea. To a certain extent, it is macho and today it would be looked upon as unforgivable. This is not denied in the opera. Mozart recognizes and identifies the situations in his music. But he transforms Da Ponte and goes well beyond him. If the libretto were to be performed simply as a play, it could be made into something very lively and very funny, but it would be nothing more than a sardonic, cynical, and rather nasty little comedy. We wouldn't come away from it with the strange joy we feel after looking through the window onto life that Mozart gives us. In rehearsal there is everything to be gained from coming back to the words in detail, for very often they are very precise. Mozart is faithful to Da Ponte in the recitatives both as to meaning and to the intimate relationship between the content of a word and the tiny twist of the musical phrase. But within, there are a thousand shades of meaning available to the singer who looks for them. These shades of meaning are musical but they are inspired by those contained in the words. This marriage in the recitatives is very intimate. But just as soon as the recitative moves into an aria, a transformation takes place and another quality becomes evident. Laurent Feneyrou:"Ah! Already the villain is fallen..." sings Don Giovanni on the death of the Commendatore, underlining the gentle weight of the body in the face of the grave. What is the meaning for you of the trio with which the first scene of the opera comes to an end? Peter Brook: I am sure that Da Ponte was incapable of foreseeing this moment. Don Giovanni begins rather frivolously. Leporello is grumbling. He's having a real moan. You can easily imagine him in a film by Marcel Pagnol sitting at table with a few friends, pastis in hand and complaining: "This won't do!" His anger at the beginning of the second act is entirely different. The recitative here is a sung recitative. Leporello's violent outburst against his master and the argument they have come over very strongly. There is nothing to indicate, however, that Leporello is a Figaro in revolt. There is a social relationship between Don Giovanni and his servant and there is a hierarchy, although it is a highly unusual one. It is different from the situation of Figaro who appears at the historic moment when servants are beginning to assert their rights and he therefore stands up against the laws of the Count. But the Count remains the master and Figaro remains a servant. Many commentators have underlined the quasi-twinship between Leporello and Don Giovanni. Peter Sellars even went so far as to have the two roles sung by twin brothers. Although there is a real social difference between the two, one of the pair having been brought up in a peasant and laborer's background and the other as an aristocrat, they are nevertheless very close to each other in the way they interact. Throughout the action Leporello appears as
an irresponsible, innocent, gross, and excrementitious element in the
personality of Don Juan while Don Juan appears as a fragment of the
rascally Leporello become brilliant and aggressive but with a conscience
convicted of sin. Leporello soothes Don Juan, who in turn animates Leporello.
It is not enough to emphasize the state of interdependence which constitutes
the Don Juan-Leporello character: we must pursue our investigation a
little further with the assertion that within that character there is
love—love for oneself, who is at the same time oneself and one's
alter ego. In the second act, when Don Giovanni gives money to Leporello and the latter accepts it, the difference between the two is restated in a most contemporary manner. He can be bought. But the reason why he can be bought is once again the form of identification that constantly appears. He has the same sexuality. He plays the game. He goes along with it. But the first scene is not a scene of revolt. The music is light. The next scene, with the entrance of Donna Anna, a woman who is like a tigress, provides a dramatic impression musically, not in the manner of Verdi but as the expression of an immense vitality and energy. A man who we don't yet know is running away from a splendid woman in an extraordinary state of rage. Don Giovanni's instincts then lead him in two directions. Firstly, we feel that his carnal desires turn him toward Donna Anna, but at the same time he wants—at any price—to be rid of a woman who is stronger than he is. To some extent, all this is funny. You can see this scene like one in a film by Quentin Tarantino in which a woman is chasing a man in a New York bar. She is furious, she screams, smashes a bottle, and threatens him. The man asks his friends to protect him at any price from this woman. The situation is a genuine one; it is dramatic but it is not tragic. There again, we are taken from comedy toward melodrama in the noblest meaning of the word. And then the Commendatore appears. Don Giovanni teases him. You can't help but find something funny in Don Giovanni's complete lack of concern. He is very cool. He provokes him. And then he kills him. The situation has been neither heavy nor oppressive, but suddenly death, the black thread that runs throughout the opera, appears in all its mystery. What inspired Mozart was Da Ponte's line when Don Giovanni says: "Already I see his soul departing from his heaving breast, I see his soul parting." He does not say: "The poor old man is dead, I have killed him." At this precise moment, Don Giovanni and the Commendatore are confronted by the reality of death as a transfiguration, like a mystical event. And Leporello is face-to-face with his own terror. The beauty of this seriousness is it comes as a complete break with the preceding situations. As with Chekhov, the intensity of this feeling is subsequently broken by the insolence of the recitative, which once again leads to another change, to another rupture. Laurent Feneyrou: During the recitative of the second scene of the first act, Leporello exclaims: "Hurray, two charming undertakings! Forcing the daughter and murdering the father." He then asks himself, "But Donna Anna, what did she ask for?" The only reply to this question is Don Giovanni's annoyance. Is Da Ponte conveying here the impossibility of uniting desire with liberty? Peter Brook: Maybe. But what desire, what liberty? These questions go way beyond the scope of our conversation. Laurent Feneyrou: Is Don Giovanni the opera of the loss of all compassion? Is the hero simply a man of laughter, a man who can mock at suffering, a dissoluto punito who is nevertheless attractive and not in the least ridiculous or humiliated? Peter Brook: Music is an absolutely indispensable language for human beings, from Gregorian chant to the most popular music, that of Piaf and rock and roll. In popular music, the words always convey feelings that everybody understands and shares and that can be summed up in just a few words. Take, for example, "Je ne regrette rien." It's an absolutely precise observation. But the meaning is vastly enhanced by Piaf's singing. The words are not enough in themselves. I cannot express myself fully if I say: "I have no regrets." That could very well give the impression of total indifference, or amorality and pretentiousness. When Piaf sings "Je ne regrette rien," there is no question at all of pretentiousness. You really understand something. You could approach the same idea from every possible angle and even write a whole book about regret, but this would be far less direct than listening to her singing. It's along these lines that it seems to me that there is something in Don Giovanni's character that arouses a feeling of sympathy. Mozart would never have accepted the commission to write an opera that would involve portraying a character that he detested. There are composers today who could do such a thing without the slightest difficulty. It's perfectly possible to imagine an opera being written on Hitler or Stalin, rather like the case of Brecht and Arturo Ui. Mozart accepted the commission because he felt compassion for Don Giovanni and had an intuitive understanding of him. This does not mean that he did not have any compassion for the other characters. As with "Je ne regrette rien," he follows the action, he lends expression to everybody and he puts Don Giovanni into situations that from our point of view are shocking and even sickening. And he expresses something else. I believe that it is Mozart's compassion that removes any idea of a mean and indifferent character, or that of an out-and-out frivolous creature. When he welcomes his three masked guests,
Don Giovanni says to them with the utmost banality: "E
aperto a tutti quanti, viva la liberta!"—and the conceptual
meaning of his words is aimed at the sole liberty of not revealing one's
identity in order to take part in the festivities where everybody can
behave as they please. Da Ponte's libretto says nothing more, but Mozart's
music draws in all the voices to join that of Don Giovanni in a triumphant
and brilliant apotheosis; it bestows upon this declaration of liberty
a new density and in consequence a more intimate meaning. It would of
course be absurd to see in this an affirmation of the political liberty
of the French Revolution; all the same, it is well and truly the liberty
to live as a man according to his natural being that is being demanded
here. There are two keys to this libretto. One is "Viva la libertá!" If you listen to this statement in its context, it has nothing to do with the French Revolution. If Mozart had put it into the mouth of Leporello, if Leporello had had an aria entitled "Viva la libertá!, the link with Figaro, and Beaumarchais would have become patent. But it is Don Giovanni who is speaking during an evening's entertainment put on in his own dwelling with the one and only aim of seducing Zerlina and possibly a number of other young girls. In other words, it's the dolce vita. And this dolce vita is provided for this very reason among peasants, for there is nobody as puritan in a society of this nature as a peasant. Masetto is a firmly upright being. "Ho capito." Then there arrive three members of the aristocracy who also have their own morality. It is Don Giovanni's wish that during this night of debauchery, the key of the door he is opening should be that of liberty. Mozart lived at a time when society was in the process of opening up. To this extent, a direct link can be found between the customs of the end of the eighteenth century and May 1968, without Mozart having been influenced either by Sade or the French Revolution. May 1968 was not so much a political movement as an authentic affirmation of "Viva la libertá!" Why do we accept what is imposed upon us by a society that provides us with no reason to believe in its values? In the end, Don Giovanni arrives at real purity in his need of liberty. Without forcing the comparison too far, he incarnates the reason for which Sartre called Genet a saint. He goes right to the end with such insistence that he becomes a curious sort of saint. This rebel has his own purity. The great ball scene in the first act is
not mere musical virtuosity with all its three separate orchestras on
the stage, and the complicated cross-rhythms of the dances. Each of
the social classes—peasantry, bourgeoisie, and aristocracy—has
its own dance, and the total independence of every rhythm is a reflection
of the social hierarchy; it is this order and harmony that is destroyed
by the attempted rape of Zerlina offstage. The other key for a satisfactory performance is the word moment. The momento. Life in the moment. It is for that reason that Don Giovanni must be performed by a singer who is also a good actor. To sing Don Giovanni, it isn't enough to be handsome with a fine voice. The acting demands are just as important as the vocal and musical demands. What is needed is an actor with the ability to change, one who can live the character of Don Giovanni moment by moment. Don Giovanni's error, his Achilles' heel, lies perhaps in his living to such an extent the wealth and joy of the moment. He is endowed with nearly every quality: charm, energy, and the attractive nature of the free man. Yet he cannot see that the present moment is inseparable from its influence over the following moment. In the immense kaleidoscope of his qualities, there is one essential thing lacking, the understanding that every act has consequences. This is precisely where the freedom of each one of us is inevitably hedged in. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov naively believes that everything is allowed to the man who is free. We come across the same problem, alas, in the case of twelve-year-old children who commit appalling crimes. There is the child who kills a classmate and who six months later remains cold and indifferent before the judge. This is a pathological case. And the other case is that of a child who is absolutely heedless. You cannot say that Don Giovanni is an exemplary being, that you can seduce and kill because it is funny. That is not liberty at all. But when Don Giovanni talks about women, he talks not merely about desire and the joy of voluptuousness but truly about love. When he gives himself body and soul, at that moment he is talking about love. This desire makes him irresistible. In "Là ci darem la mano!" he is a professional seducer with immense charm. But when Zerlina falls into his arms, the duet they sing together is a little love duet of great purity. And it is precisely here that you find all the dialectic and fascinating sides to the character. From a certain point of view, it represents a joyful expression of liberty. But there is a flaw in Don Giovanni's personality: he never foresees the terrifying consequences of his acts. He refuses even to recognize them. But what is the force, then, by which Don
Juan seduces? It is desire, the energy of sensuous desire. He desires
in every woman the whole of womanhood, and therein lies the sensuously
idealizing power with which he at once embellishes and overcomes his
prey. The reaction to this gigantic passion beauties and develops the
one desired, who flushes in enhanced beauty by its reflection, the object
of his desire, who blushes in response to it. At the end of the opera, if one listens to the music, it is clear that once again the presence of the mystery of death is infinitely more important than the idea of punishment, even though Da Ponte wrote punito. At that time, when devils came on stage, the audience used to laugh. They were not in the least terrorized by their appearance. Here, the music does not play along with the church by invoking Hell. It goes much further than that, for the feeling is deeper and more serious, as in a requiem. Laurent Feneyrou: So Don Giovanni is apparently uncalculating; but in addition, he has no memory, plan, or method. He seems to be absolutely spontaneous. Unaware of the future, he seems forgetful of his certain fate, thus freeing himself from such a vision. In your view, are his moments hermetically sealed? Peter Brook: I believe that this is absolutely so. His moments are inseparable from the flaw, from the one thing that this man lacks, the capacity at any precise moment to remember what has gone just before and to understand what is to come. If his memory had been totally developed, he might have found within himself the moral consciousness that even without external moral pressures, would have changed his behavior toward others. Laurent Feneyrou:
Does this mean that his forgetfulness lends legitimacy to the incessant Peter Brook:
Yes, I believe that to a certain extent, women for him are like a meal.
Even though we may not have the experience of mille
e tre women, everyone of us has enjoyed the experience of mille
e tre, if not more, dinners or glasses of wine in our lives.
The memory of a glass of wine does not help us to refuse another glass
the following day. The glass of wine is an experience that passes. And
somewhere in his digestive system, Don Giovanni behaves in this fashion
with women. Each Don Juan is a man who represents what is
possible. His desire is power and all his relationships are relationships
of power and possession. That is why he is a myth of modern times. But
this is only the outside appearance. Because he is a man of desire,
Don Juan is a being who lives in the sphere of the fascination that
he exercises and exploits and in which he delights; at the same time
he maintains, by means of his mastery and constant betrayal, the desire-driven
liberty that he does not wish to relinquish. Don Juan knows very well
that he is welcoming impossibility with desire, but he asserts that
impossibility is none other than the sum of what is possible and that
it can therefore be mastered in the same way as a number and it matters
not at all that this number should be one thousand and three, or even
a few more or a few less. Don Juan could very well commit himself to
one woman only, whom he would possess but a single time, always provided
that he could desire her, not as the one and only woman but as the single
entity summoning the infinity of repetition. Laurent Feneyrou: In the last scene of the first act, Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio come on stage masked. Did Mozart find the essence of the theater in these characters without a face, in the hidden and concealed being of the characters? Is not Don Giovanni also the "fertile satiety of the carnival"? Peter Brook: What fascinates me in nearly all works of art is that they go a great deal further than the most gifted of their authors could possibly explain. A number of contemporary authors such as Pinter and Beckett have always refused to provide the least explanation. They claim that they don't know, that they haven't the least idea about their characters. "What happens after the play?" "But there isn't an end." "What happened before?" "But there wasn't a before. The character said only what I wrote." Generation after generation, century upon century, layer upon layer get added, which have nothing to do with the author's intentions. A great many works can be interpreted in countless ways. When the interpretation hits the right note, the overall impression that emerges is that of an absolute truth, one which was always there. It may well be that this interpretation escapes people from another epoch or culture. At the same time, another aspect can appear as something self-evident. All great works are things in movement. Some of their constituent parts are hidden in the subconscious of the works. As a result of the fluctuating conditions of our lives, new readings come to the surface, other readings disappear. I believe that today, we are much less in sympathy than we were fifty years ago with the commedia dell'arte and the pantomime humor. It is for this reason that we are wrong to attribute to any given author philosophical or analytical intentions that we might well discover later. Even though Mozart had penetrating and highly intelligent ideas on the theater, I cannot for a moment think that when he was writing a scene with masked characters he was giving much thought to masks. He wrote in the intuitive movement of an act of creation. The case of Pirandello on the other hand is quite different. He had thought a great deal about illusion on the stage and he tried to express in his plays a number of ideas about the theater and about life. There are masks simply because there are characters who do not want to be recognized. Although we may respect those people who write about a particular work, it has to be said that literal analysis is somewhat dangerous for a director and for an actor in so much as it introduces didactic or theoretical concepts. And a singer, just like an actor can think of nothing else save the ideas that he is expressing. They have to find life, moment by moment. In Don Giovanni, taking off one's mask is
no longer a matter of acknowledging a concealed identity, since in any
case, the other being is no longer identical with the original self.
It is a matter of casting aside a dramatic convention and revealing
a face which is no longer that of an identity, outside all other possible
faces. At the end of the first act, Don Giovanni is preparing to give
a reception in his mansion in order to seduce Zerlina. Laughter is wafted
through the dense air of the night, occasional Judgments of dance music
and snatches of conversation can be heard. The lighted windows are like
cutouts against the darkness and they attract passersby like moths to
the trap set by Don Giovanni. We know that the three dominoes who come
onstage are Anna, Ottavio, and Elvira, all of them intent on ruining
Don Giovanni's erotic schemes. When they remove their masks simultaneously
and sing aside an appeal to divine justice, they are not revealing their
stage identities but removing themselves from their dramatic condition.
What they are showing is their inner face, that of a reality which reveals
them and which is no longer their vengeance. The settings of the masquerade,
the festivities, and the theater are superimposed and the revealed identity
is transformed into a person that the being disintegrates. Through the
intervention of the mask and behind the hollow shape of the face, Mozart
lends substance to the invisible, bereft of its nonface, its double
identity. Laurent Feneyrou: In your view, why are all Don Giovanni's promising plans frustrated as soon as the Commendatore has met his death? Peter Brook: Da Ponte opted for the best dramatic sequence. Given the speed of events—everything takes place within the space of twenty-four hours, with a statue that the funeral undertakers of the time miraculously managed to produce within the same twenty-four hours—the theatrical tempo is never allowed to falter, never allowed to let up. It is wonderful. And within the setting of the plot, the comic situations depend entirely on this permanent frustration. It would have been far more ponderous to display a series of seductions. The dominant idea here in the plot is that nothing can go right. The devil is at hand and it's the moment of truth. Don Giovanni's time is up. That very day he began to career wildly to his death. Just as he is about to catch Zerlina a second time, Masetto appears. This scene can be played either as a moment of frustration, or as a slight frustration, dispelled by the considerable delights of danger. Masetto has appeared. Don Giovanni is well aware just how much Masetto wants to get him. And there you have Don Giovanni in his entirety, in his absolutely primitive, intuitive, animal, and ferocious joy over finding himself, like Zorro, in great danger. It's like what happens in kung fu films. It's the same situation as Bruce Lee meeting a pretty girl. He's attracted. Then suddenly five thugs turn up. Of course, he's disappointed about not getting the girl, but he is overjoyed at finding himself confronted by five nasty and dangerous individuals. This is at work in the scene with Masetto in the second act. If the scene is played too lightly, it turns into operetta, "Offenbach," or a farce with a deceived husband and armed idiots. But if it is thought that Masetto and the villagers are powerful thugs who have every reason to kill Don Giovanni, then Don Giovanni, even in disguise, is in a dangerous situation. He provokes them. Who goes there? He could escape, say something else, but he pronounces his name: "I am Don Giovanni's servant." Masetto replies: "Leporello." That does nothing to avert the danger. Don Giovanni stokes up the situation to such an extent that to extricate himself his only possibility is to add: "That scoundrel." He says it with such vehemence that Masetto is convinced that he is on their side. That is what leads into the rest of the story. And it is a pretty dreadful story. Don Giovanni, disguised as Leporello, asks Masetto and the villagers to find Leporello, disguised as Don Giovanni, to give him a good beating and then kill him. He provokes an extremely dangerous situation for his servant. This is ferocity a la Bruce Lee. Laurent Feneyrou: Is there a place for God in Don Giovanni and in the death of its hero? Peter Brook: There are two completely different gods. There is the god of religions. That particular god is always a god to whom the different religions, churches, and sects have given a face and attributes. And there is the mystical god, a god who has no form and who is not the Catholic, personal god to whom one speaks literally as to a father. And if Mozart's god, after having been the god of Freemasonry, becomes the god who has no name, no form, no face, who cannot be named or expressed in words but who can be evoked as a reality by means of music, then I would say that that is the god of Mozart in all his religious music. But I would make a complete and absolute separation from the didactic god of religion who is of use to the church by stressing good, evil, punishment, paradise, hell, and all the rest. Mozart's music is neither doctrinaire nor didactic. A profound spirituality is common to both The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni. In a way, there is as much spirituality in Don Giovanni as there is in The Magic Flute. The two operas are complementary. At first sight, The Magic Flute is more mystical than Don Giovanni. The religion in it is shown in its finest colors, the colors of an illuminated paradise, in spite of the darkness and obscurity embodied in Monostatos. Don Giovanni has the same spiritual depth, but it does not shine. The two works span the whole range of the private and intimate feelings of Mozart's spirituality. It is the same composer who is making his way along the same path. Laurent Feneyrou: Does the experience of the void run through the whole of Don Giovanni? Peter Brook: The mysterious scene in the second act, set in a dark courtyard, is one which seems to take place nowhere. There is no realism to justify Leporello taking Donna Elvira to the very place to which Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Zerlina, and Masetto will make their way a few seconds later. it is a scene that takes place in a mysterious spot, in a situation of dramatic farce where the music is very intense and of great beauty. Leporello in disguise is revealed for who he is. The characters wander around in this no-man's-land. What a powerful impression of sadness emanates here from an opera that is otherwise positive, affirmative, and strong! You cannot imagine how long the time seemed
to me, away from you! I cannot express my feelings, but it's like a
void-which hurts me—a sort of languor which is never satisfied
and which later is never appeased—which lasts forever and even
grows day by day. Laurent Feneyrou: In the last scene, vengeance, rage, and spite have lost all their point or impact. The punishment is aimless. Although Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Zerlina, and Masetto had hitherto existed only through their fascinated attachment to their master, they are all now afraid of the desire-filled liberty that Don Giovanni has revealed to them. Is Don Giovanni a sort of vanishing point, a horizon whose loss leaves man on his own, wandering and abandoned? Peter Brook: That is absolutely so! All the characters are splendid, touching, profoundly touching because in their own ways, they are all lost. Don Giovanni himself is a lost soul without realizing it. Every individual who lives the feverish sort of life he did is bound to come to a sudden stop. There is perhaps an absolute void. For Leporello, there is nothing completely satisfying. It is perhaps for that reason that he is very human, because, like everybody, he leads a life of compromise, with his blend of dreadful cowardice and eminently likable qualities. Laurent Feneyrou: Exhausting desire, desiring in a vacuum, desiring nothing save music, the source of life and energy, is that how Mozart composed? Peter Brook: If we come back to the fact that music is the one language of humanity that touches the most fundamental truths, all musicians are extraordinarily lucky. After the saints and the great mystics, the people who are the luckiest in the world, even though they may endure appalling trials, are those who enjoy the genius of music. The musician hears what is inaccessible to others. When he enters into this inaccessible sphere, his joy is extraordinary. The composer has access to a world to which most of us have no access. But almost anybody can feel a taste for music. It is for that reason that music does not exist only in the head of the composer. It is bound up with the generous need to share. We cannot enter the mind of Mozart but we can go fairly deeply into his experience. Before the act of composition, there is no shape or form. Then music adopts a certain shape, one which has yet to become a vehicle. Mozart writes his score. And we approach him, we climb a mountain with him. Our own vision is no longer the one we are accustomed to experience every day. But he himself had no choice. He was born like that, even if his genius endowed him neither with the rights nor the powers of great adventurers and great financiers. It was beyond his control to create the material conditions of his life. Quite the opposite was true, and the art of Bach and of Mozart could not spare them day-to-day troubles, creditors, and the inevitable difficulties with wives and children. On the other hand, what the composer bears within himself provides him with permanent access to another level of human existence. And in the end, this is far more important than anything else. Or else, taking away and giving back, privation
and restoration, these also represent the division between the two states
of the code: language and music are both symbols but opposed as to the
economy of the body. in both instances, you have retrenchment, creation
of absence, and theft. But where language restores only an almost abstract
vibration to which there still adheres, together with the intelligible,
the whole misfortune of articulated mourning, music restores to this
stolen body a system of vibrations which bathe and envelop, provoke
resonance, touch at every fiber, remaking for you by means of caresses
a body without fortuity or weight, a transfigured body. Singing which
soars above the historic misfortune of speaking, and music which resolves
the farewell that lingers in the singing, that is what opera is. Mozart
knew with the absolute certainty of his bodily being what music had
to say about itself through him. Further back: abducted by music and
trained to say farewell through it; further on: leaning toward music
to derive consolation. What had the law on its side had to have love
on its side, too. Don Giovanni is no
less of a miracle for having this as
its justification. Laurent Feneyrou: You wrote in The Shifting Point: "Opera was born fifty-thousand years ago when people came out of their caves uttering sounds. From these sounds there came Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner. There was a noise for fear, for love, for happiness, and for anger. It was opera on one note and atonal to boot. At that precise moment, it was a natural human expression which turned into singing. A long time later, this process was codified, given structure and turned into art." Is it the desire for sound between "the plumbing and the water which flows through it" that animates Don Giovanni? Peter Brook: Man has developed an extraordinary instrument, that of conceptual language, which to a great extent is an expression of the functioning of the brain, of mental processes. But before that, there was a first language that came from the language of animals, the language of feeling. The cries of animals express in a very primitive manner feelings to which they give outward expression by a sound. Before expression, ideas, and concepts, early man expressed his state of being and the state of his emotions by sounds and cries. These were cries of pain, of distress, of warning, and of joy. Later, the first word for happy did not suffice to express a feeling of unlimited joy. A sound was added to it, coming before, with, and after the word. In the work I have carried out with actors, we have been able to see how a need for expression can spring from a single note, an absolutely necessary note. Then, as with the most primitive melodies, there comes a phrase with two notes, then three. A form is in the making. There is nothing artificial about the evolution of this form into what we call opera. Quite the contrary, for it is the most natural way in the world to enhance a mere word, which in itself is incapable of expressing the whole range of feelings that it suggests. The statement “Je ne regrette rien" is a generalization. But Piaf—just as Mozart in Don Giovanni, each in their own way—expresses word by word the inner and hidden shades of meaning. Translated from the French by John Sidgwick
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