opera notebook
some operas I have seen on videoHelena Cánovas, Don Juan No Existe (2024)
libretto by Alberto Iglesias and the composer
Festival Perelada, 2024
- Conductor: Jhoanna Sierralta
- Director: Bárbara Lluch
- Set Designer: Blanca Añón
- Carmen / Helena: Natalia Labourdette
- Don Juan / Augustin: David Oller
- Miguel: Pablo García-López
Based on the work of the early 20th-century intellectual Carmen Díaz de Mendoza Aguado, Helena Cánovas' innovative opera falls into two halves. In the first, Carmen is haunted by the misogynist icon Don Juan. She has nothing against Mozart, she says, but she cannot stand the way Don Giovanni has become more hero than anti-. Two men discuss her project of undermining Don Juan: the skeptical baritone Augustin and the sympathetic tenor Miguel.
In the second half, Carmen merges into the figure of Helena, presumably the composer herself. She is haunted not just by Don Giovanni but by the way that Díaz de Mendoza has been erased by intellectual history, her work (including her Don Giovanni piece) lost to posterity. The male voices change perspectives: the tenor now losing patience with her, the baritone (Don Juan himself?) singing a more rueful counterpoint.
Scored for a distinctive ensemble of percussion, strings, and saxophones, the music begins as occasional cacophony and then gradually gathers texture and coherence as the opera moves toward its conclusion, a litany of feminist thinkers elided by history.