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‘Every Carnival Has Its End’

Santa Fe Opera/Curtis Brown

From left: Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Donna Anna; Ryan Speedo Green (seated) as Don Giovanni, William Guanbo Su as Masetto, and Liv Redpath as Zerlina in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Don Giovanni, 2024

“With blondes, he praises their gentleness; with brunettes, their faithfulness…. The large ones he calls majestic, the little ones charming.” So Don Giovanni’s manservant, Leporello, tells the jilted Donna Elvira. Then the knife twist: “But his greatest passion is the young virgin.” 

The exchange neatly captures the ambivalence and amorality of Mozart’s seducer. Don Giovanni, it suggests, has a way of being all things to all people. Throughout the opera, he is repeatedly confused with someone else. When he and Leporello switch outfits, not even their lovers see through the disguise; when he tries to rape the noblewoman Donna Anna, she mistakes him for her fiancé. The audience is hardly clearer about his identity. Alone among the opera’s major characters, he has neither soliloquies nor moments of introspection. His flights of lyricism, like the seduction duet “Là ci darem la mano,” are means to sexual conquest. His great showpiece, the Champagne Aria, “Fin ch’han del vino,” betrays no signs of an inner life—only a relentless, superhuman energy. 

Leporello tells Elvira that Giovanni has seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone. During the opera he assaults two more, kills one man, and beats another half to death. He lies as easily as he breathes and betrays Leporello without hesitation. He enjoys the privileges his society affords him, invoking the droit de seigneur at a peasant wedding, even as he corrodes society from within. To Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni embodied the erotic power of music itself; he was desire in its purest form, “victorious, triumphant, irresistible, and demonic.” More recent interpreters have seen him as a charming monster who, in the words of the director John Caird, “slowly turns his own heart into stone.”

The opera, like its central figure, has worn different faces at different times. Early critics in the dying days of the ancien régime praised its “beauty, greatness and nobility.” Mozart’s biographer Maynard Solomon, writing in 1995, noted its “jarring fragility and incompleteness.” But Don Giovanni has always been elusive. Musically it alternates lucid grace with raw violence. Dramatically it lurches between terror and farce, refined sensuality and sadistic laughter, inviting interpretations only to confound them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the final scene. At the climactic moment, a defiant Don Giovanni is dragged into hell, accompanied by a D-minor conflagration in the orchestra. The performance seems to be over; at this point, neophytes often stand and applaud. But no sooner has the last chord died away than the surviving characters rush onstage, eagerly proclaiming the moral of the story: “The wicked always meet the end they deserve.” The orchestra rounds things off with a perfunctory cadence. 

The Romantics were among the first to find this epilogue unsatisfactory. Franz Liszt omitted it from his piano fantasia on the opera; many nineteenth-century productions followed suit. This reflected a new dramatic sensibility and a new view of Mozart’s Don Juan. For a generation preoccupied with eros and the irrational, he took on a cosmic significance. He was now a Promethean rebel, like Milton’s Satan or Goethe’s Faust (“Mozart should have composed Faust,” Goethe remarked to a friend). His damnation, far from putting him in his place, testified to his terrible grandeur. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan”—a kind of metafictional fantasy about the opera—Giovanni’s attempted rape of Donna Anna becomes a moment of transfiguring passion, and her vengeful pursuit of him the product of perverted love.

Hoffmann’s admiration persists, in cruder form, in many later readings. In the twentieth century Giovanni became a Romantic cutout, an existentialist antihero, or (a favorite publicity cliché) “opera’s bad boy.” Even the productions I saw as a child sanitized him, where they did not overtly lionize him. The blunt Italian verb used in the libretto to describe his assault on Donna Anna—sforzar, “force”—was translated as “ravish.” In her study Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier describes one not atypical staging, at Toronto’s Opera Atelier in 2019. As Giovanni grapples with Donna Anna, her “body language is at odds with what she says…. Anna says no, but based on the staging of the scene, she means yes.”1

Like Cormier, many listeners now understand Don Giovanni rather differently. Criticisms of the character are not exactly new. “At the end of the charming seduction is rape,” the philosopher Catherine Clément wrote in 1979 in Opera, or the Undoing of Women.2 But in recent years the opera itself has come under fire. Academics have implicated it in the behavior of alleged sexual predators, like the disgraced Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine. Some musicians have professed their reluctance to perform it. A few educational institutions have dropped it from their curricula. 

None of this has seriously challenged its canonic status, and opera companies still put it on, though they seem to feel the need to justify themselves: “Why present Don Giovanni in 2021?,” one interviewer asked the Seattle Opera’s cast. Among their answers: because it is a “cautionary tale”; because it is about overcoming abuse; because it “illuminates the powerlessness and trauma of victims.” Such accounts restore, in a different form, the moral that the Romantics excised. Don Giovanni embodies not desire as such, but pathological male desire. Not “masculinity in all of its marvelous splendor and power,” as Hoffmann wrote, but masculinity at its most base and destructive.

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This view informs contemporary productionswhich pass judgment on Don Giovanni in various ways. Sometimes that judgment is enacted within the drama: in 2007 I saw a performance in Berlin in which, at the end of the damnation scene, Giovanni’s penis was cut off and flung across the stage; in Opera Queensland’s 2018 interpretation, a crowd of naked women dragged him to hell. More often it is a matter of characterization. A few minutes into a recent staging at the Metropolitan Opera, he shoots Donna Anna’s father in cold blood rather than killing him in a duel, as the libretto has it.

Santa Fe Opera/Curtis Brown

Ryan Speedo Green as Don Giovanni in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Don Giovanni, 2024

Stephen Barlow’s production for the Santa Fe Opera, which I saw in August, was less heavy-handed, emphasizing the character’s vanity and buffoonery rather than his villainy. The bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green portrayed, as Clément wrote of the character, “a pathetic man who does not get what he wants.” The staging had a subtlety not always evident in recent interpretations; but in its attempt to cut the seducer down to size, it was unmistakably of its time.

Don Giovanni’s deflation began with the overture, well before he would customarily come onstage. During the lacerating D-minor introduction—whose music prefigures the damnation scene, hanging over the opera like an axe—the stage remained empty. Then, with the allegro, the walls of the set swung open to reveal Giovanni in his home, posing for a painting in his dressing gown. More than a dozen other portraits—all sporting the same red robe and mock-heroic pose—were scattered along the walls. The set swung shut again, concealing this pantomime from view. But by the time Giovanni made his usual entrance in the first scene, pursued by Donna Anna, we already knew he was a pompous clown. 

This set the tone for what followed. The Santa Fe production—demystified, amusing, often arch—showed what we have gained, and what we have lost, in dragging the demon down to earth.

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Don Giovanni unfolds in three large arcs: the first occupies Act I; the others divide Act II. Each begins with a series of arias, recitatives, and duets—the classic elements of Italianate “number opera”—in which the individual characters pursue their separate affairs. Then it grows more complex as the characters are drawn together, culminating in an extended choral or ensemble scene, of symphonic intricacy and force, that is at the same time a scene of collective judgment. 

Twice Giovanni escapes punishment: in the first act he abandons Donna Elvira, assaults Donna Anna and kills her father, then tries to seduce the peasant Zerlina; he flees the masked ball that closes the act just as his victims are about to exact vengeance. Midway through Act II they seem to have caught up with him, only to capture Leporello in disguise. But in the third arc judgment comes in the form of Donna Anna’s father, the Commendatore—or, more exactly, his statue, which Giovanni has mockingly invited to dinner. In the finale it arrives at Giovanni’s home with a chorus of demons, demanding he repent. When he refuses, his fate is sealed. The supernatural accomplishes what society could not.

Giovanni’s downfall seems fated before he sets foot onstage. The overture opens with two gestures: a pair of slashing, syncopated chords, D minor and its dominant A major, and a trudging processional underpinned by a descending chromatic scale—the so-called lamento bass, a time-honored symbol of grief and anguish. These figures saturate the opera. Violins outline that chromatic scale during Giovanni’s duel with Donna Anna’s father, landing on a jarring diminished seventh chord when he strikes the fatal blow; woodwinds then reiterate it as the Commendatore dies. The cheerful stock gesture that announces Giovanni’s final dinner—D-major and A-major chords, with the violins tracing a descending fourth—echoes the syncopated harmonies that began the overture and foreshadows their return. When the Commendatore’s statue appears in Giovanni’s doorway, those syncopations come back with an added shock: the D-minor chord has been transformed into a diminished seventh, the same dissonance we heard when Giovanni’s sword found its mark. Coupled with the libretto’s doublings and symmetries—between master and servant, fiancé and rapist, the grim last supper and the glittering masked ball—these patterns convey the sense of an occult order closing in on Giovanni as the drama nears its end.

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Barlow’s staging, though conservative on the surface, modified the opera’s original scheme in telling ways. First it transposed the action from feudal Spain to late-Victorian London, replacing the aristocracy with the haute bourgeoisie and the Spanish peasantry with cockneys. This choice, which initially puzzled me—why was the opera set in the world of Sherlock Holmes?—took on new significance when coupled with the casting. Leporello is often cast as Giovanni’s double; in Peter Sellars’s famous 1990 film, the two roles were sung by twins. Most productions settle for a vaguer resemblance, making the singers the same height or same build. In Santa Fe, Green and his Leporello, Nicholas Newton, were two of three Black singers. 

Santa Fe Opera/Curtis Brown

Rachel Fitzgerald as Donna Anna, Ryan Speedo Green as Don Giovanni, and David Portillo as Don Ottavio in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Don Giovanni, 2024

The third was Soloman Howard, superb and iron-voiced as the Commendatore.3 Howard played one of the few men in the opera not confused with the seducer. Yet in Barlow’s staging they were closely linked, and not just because, with Newton, they were the only Black men onstage. In the finale, rather than appearing at the door in the form of a statue, Howard emerged from one of those ridiculous paintings, clad in a singed red dressing gown. He was another double—a haggard portrait of Giovanni’s soul. Green rushed at him with a carving fork, seeming to stab him before falling to the ground, the fork protruding from his own belly. The final sextet was sung over his corpse. Having neglected to read the press materials, that was when I finally grasped the opera’s setting: it was the London not of Conan Doyle but of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Initially this ending produced a pleasant frisson, like the third-act plot twist in a film noir. Thinking about it afterward, however, I started to have doubts. The Commendatore has been interpreted in different ways. To Kierkegaard he was Spirit personified, negating Don Juan’s “immediate, sensate life.” To the philosopher Bernard Williams his return was a “vast and alarming natural consequence” of the seducer’s life, “rather than a transcendental judgment.” In Barlow’s staging it was neither. When Dorian Gray confronts the mocking face of his portrait, its loathsome features and hypocritical smile, he sees “his own soul…looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgement.” Wilde’s tale is a study in the psychology of guilt and remorse—two things Giovanni conspicuously lacks.

In this sense, Barlow’s vision seemed subtly but crucially at odds with Mozart’s own. In making the opera less savage and more humane, the production obscured something essential: paradoxically, Giovanni’s very shallowness, his incapacity for regret or reflection, gives Don Giovanni much of its human depth. This effect is bound up with its genre—with the question of what kind of artwork it really is.

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Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, called Don Giovanni a dramma giocoso. The label hints at its ambiguity but doesn’t do justice to its range. The figure of Don Juan—as he emerged from the Baroque dramas of Tirso de Molina and Molière—was a mythic trickster, with roots in the archetypes of premodern popular theater; there hung about him the atmosphere of Carnival, the season of license preceding Lent.

In one sense Mozart’s Don Giovanni retains this antique flatness. It deals, or so we think at first, not in characters but stock figures—the rake, the patriarch, the shrew—often portrayed with a slapstick absurdity. Yet alongside this, and emerging with increasing force as the story unfolds, is something more intimate and pained. The result is an unstable mixture of tragedy and farce: in “Là ci darem la mano” Zerlina is hypnotized by Giovanni like a mouse by a snake; then Elvira bursts onstage and chases him away, transforming him from Svengali into Mr. Punch. The Commendatore’s death, set to a plangent lament in the woodwinds, transitions into vaudevillian patter: “Who’s dead,” Leporello asks his employer, “you or the old man?”

It is hard to capture this full tonal range in performance. Most interpretations emphasize some moods over others. In the Santa Fe production, intriguingly, there seemed to be two distinct interpretations at work. If you closed your eyes, Green was a frightening, protean Don Giovanni, projecting unctuous charm and heroic power by turns. If you opened them, however, he became a bit of a ham, all suggestive eyebrow movements and leering smiles. Most of the excellent cast seemed similarly torn. Rachael Wilson, as Donna Elvira, delivered a masterclass in vocal characterization: in the first act her singing was virtuosic yet deliberately harsh and uningratiating; in the second her voice opened up, revealing an unexpected tenderness and warmth. Vocally her Elvira began as a comedic caricature and ended as a woman in love. But on stage she remained a caricature to the end. In the final scene, she crouched over Giovanni’s body in a pantomime of mourning, mugging for laughs.

What explains this tension between music and action? In contemporary opera productions, staging and singing serve two different, not necessarily compatible purposes. The former, much of the time, is intended to bridge the perceived gap between a work and its audience—to bring it in line with, or address its distance from, contemporary values. The Berlin Don Giovanni did so through Brechtian alienation; the Met production by signaling its disapproval. The Santa Fe production both diminished the title character and softened the opera’s stark contrasts of tone. The hints of parody in “Là ci darem la mano” robbed Elvira’s interruption of its deflating shock; the attempted seduction of Elvira’s maid was staged as a comic defeat; minutes after a brutal beating from Giovanni, Zerlina’s jealous husband, Masetto, walked offstage with his head held high. Taken together, these choices smoothed away Don Giovanni’s sadism. The audience laughed often, but it was rarely disturbed. 

The singers, for their part, tried to make dramatic sense of Mozart’s music—and for that reason they captured something the staging did not. The mixture of comic and tragic modes is central to Don Giovanni’s view of character. Initially these modes are personified by two figures: Donna Anna, the avenger and tragic heroine, and Donna Elvira, the discarded lover and comic shrew. As the opera progresses, however, this dichotomy is called into question. Like all that matters most in Don Giovanni, that transformation happens in the music, and only secondarily, if at all, on the stage.

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Like its immediate predecessor, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni is descended from the tradition of opera buffa, with its carnivalesque mood and disreputable characters. Yet it is haunted by the ghost of opera seria—the Baroque tradition exemplified by Handel, concerned with the dignified passions of heroes and kings. Opera seria depicted those passions in stark, primary colors: a typical aria expressed one overriding emotion, or two contrasting emotions schematically opposed; an outpouring of rage might be followed by a burst of grief in a different key, then repeated essentially unchanged. This formal scheme, in its symmetry and deliberate artifice, reflected a system of aesthetic values that was already falling out of favor in Mozart’s time. In the operas that he wrote with Da Ponte, opera seria became a symbol of spiritual immobility, its conventions providing the outward sign of stunted inner lives. Opera buffa, by contrast, came to signify the flexible, the changeable, the free.

Santa Fe Opera/Curtis Brown

Nicholas Newton as Leporello and Ryan Speedo Green as Don Giovanni in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Don Giovanni, 2024

In The Marriage of Figaro, that freedom is associated with the lower classes, set against the inward stasis of the ancien régime. Figaro sings the aria “Se vuol ballare, signor contino” on learning that his employer, the Count, has tried to cuckold him. It is a display of tightly controlled sarcasm, punctuated by momentary bursts of rage; repeatedly suppressed, his anger finally overflows, destroying the symmetry of the aria as a flooding river destroys its banks. The Count, by contrast, is imprisoned by his own social role. When Figaro tricks him, he sings the aria “Vedrò, mentr’io sospiro,” which depicts him hemmed in by majestic Baroque ornaments, frozen in a pose of outraged vanity. It is not in the nobility but in the servants, as Williams writes, “that some larger and more spontaneous humanity has triumphed.”

In Don Giovanni the play of styles has grown more elusive and the triumph more equivocal. Both female leads initially speak in the accents of opera seria. We first hear those accents after Don Giovanni flees the scene of his crime, and Anna’s fiancé, Don Ottavio, rushes in. A tense recitative, accompanied by hammering Handelian chords in the strings, introduces one of the most alienated duets in the operatic literature. Fuggi, crudele, fuggi!, Anna sings, “flee, cruel man”—as if even now her fiancé and her assailant were hard to tell apart. By the end, her anguish has started to lose its grip. Her final aria, “Non mi dir, bell’ idol mio”“do not tell me, my love, that I am cruel to you”—begins with a serene sadness, then moves through grief to a dancelike poise, before ending in a flurry of exuberant vocal leaps and plummeting runs. It conveys an extraordinary sense of freedom, sliding from rapt interiority to extroverted power. Yet the psychological truth of the music clashes ironically with the duplicity of the words. “You know well how much I love you,” Anna tells Ottavio. Here, at least, most modern listeners agree with Hoffmann: we don’t know any such thing.

Donna Elvira’s transformation is no less striking. In her the hints of opera seria are pushed to the point of satire: she is a Handelian character lost in a Mozartian world, and her appearance has a comic incongruity—like a knight from a medieval romance showing up, fully armed, at one of Jane Austen’s country balls. We first encounter her singing a wild parody of a Baroque rage aria, leaping between the extremes of her vocal range as she swears to tear out her betrayer’s heart. By the end, she too has broken free.

But where Anna escapes the prison of opera seria, Elvira destroys that prison from within. A stern recitative precedes her final aria, “Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata,” accompanied by the same Baroque rhythms that introduced Anna’s duet with Don Ottavio. As Elvira addresses herself—“Wretched Elvira! What conflicting passions are born within you!”—her resolve crumbles; new melodic figures appear in the orchestra as the harmony restlessly shifts about.

What follows is, to all appearances, a textbook da capo aria in the style of Handel: its first section, in E-flat major, shows Elvira contemplating forgiveness; the second darkens to E-flat minor, the Commendatore’s music appearing like a shadow in the orchestra as she recounts her desire for revenge. Then the first section returns, its text repeated verbatim, though this is no mere reprise. Instead, by the subtlest of harmonic shifts, Mozart sends the music spinning off in a different direction. The vocal line takes on a new force and resolution, twisting into an exhilarating display of virtuosity that is—like the end of Anna’s final aria—at the same time a display of moral strength. We hear Elvira moving beyond forgiveness to a determination to save Giovanni from himself.

On stage and in the libretto, that determination can seem faintly retrograde; in the final scene, Elvira vows to end her days in a convent. Yet the music tells a different story, revealing not just her human mutability but her power. “Visually, the [operatic heroine] is the passive object of our gaze,” writes the musicologist Carolyn Abbate.4 “But, aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice.” Elvira’s story, like Anna’s, culminates in just such a vocal battering. The text speaks of self-sacrifice and the music of triumph.

The two women thus reach a kind of synthesis: Anna’s tragedy has taken on a hint of high comedy while the comic Elvira has revealed tragic depths. From the simplicity of commedia dell’arte stock figures, they have assumed a living complexity and inwardness. As Giovanni’s world is closing in on him, theirs is opening up.

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These images do not resolve into each other. We might see them, instead, as a kind of diptych, one whose subject is Mozart himself. In biographical readings of the opera, Kierkegaard’s clash of instinct and spirit is recast in psychoanalytic terms: the Commendatore stands for Mozart’s unforgiving father, Leopold, and Giovanni for Wolfgang the eternal child. Yet Don Giovanni’s fundamental contrast is not between the rake and his nemesis but between their shared moral universe and that of the other characters. In this respect the opera is better understood as a portrait of the artist than of the man. On one side lies the composer of the Requiem, with its visions of the saved and the damned, on the other the worldly artist of Figaro, in which the quotidian touches the divine. Don Giovanni captures, more fully than any other of Mozart’s works, the tension within him between the archaic and the modern—between a world of stark principles and elemental drives and one of changeable women and men.

These pictures are interdependent. Giovanni, writes Kierkegaard, personifies “the life principle” in the other characters; “his passion resonates in…the Commendatore’s earnestness, Elvira’s wrath, Anna’s hate, Ottavio’s pomposity, Zerlina’s anxiety, Masetto’s indignation, Leporello’s confusion.” By the same token, it is only in confrontation with them that he assumes human shape. In the words of the Slavicist Boris Gasparov, “He is pastoral in his duet with Zerlina, cynically jocular with Leporello, mockingly deferential to Ottavio, alternately cunning and audacious in his confrontations with Donna Anna, banal—one could even say provincial—in his mandoline serenade to Donna Elvira’s maid.”5

If so, then only through Anna’s and Elvira’s stories can we understand Don Giovanni’s. And vice-versa: the opera’s humanism—the sense of grace and forgiving irony that envelops its surviving characters—is bound up with his sublime inhumanity. This poses a dramatic problem for directors and performers, since there may be no way to demystify Giovanni without diminishing his victims’ dignity. It also poses a moral problem for listeners. For Giovanni’s greatest seduction is of the audience: to attend a performance that does him justice is to be lured repeatedly into identification—and to be repeatedly caught up short. 

Ever since Kierkegaard, philosophers have been haunted by the thought that Giovanni embodies some necessary facet of our nature: desire, vitality, an insatiable thirst for experience. To Simone de Beauvoir he was the archetype of the “adventurer” who pursues “action for its own sake,” indifferent to the suffering of others. Yet his passion for life is close to, perhaps a precondition of, true freedom. “Those who survive Giovanni,” writes Williams, including

not only the other characters, but, on each occasion that we have seen the opera, ourselves—are both more and less than he is: more, since the conditions on humanity, which we accept, are also the conditions of humanity; and less, since one thing vitality needs is to sustain the dream of being as free from conditions as he is.

That is, he represents a force within us both monstrous and indispensable: a will to life, a boundless self-assertion whose triumph and extinction alike would leave us less than human.

Santa Fe Opera/Curtis Brown

Nicholas Newton as Leporello in the Santa Fe Opera’s production of Don Giovanni, 2024

Near the end of the opera, Giovanni sits in his chambers waiting for the Commendatore, enthusiastically devouring his banquet. (“What a barbarous appetite,” Leporello remarks.) He is alone but for his servant and an onstage band. “I want to enjoy myself,” he declares, calling for them to play. They launch into a medley of operatic hits, most of them now forgotten: first comes a tune from Una cosa rara, by Mozart’s contemporary Vicente Martín y Soler; then one from Giuseppe Sarti’s Fra i Due Litiganti. Leporello greets both with appreciative noises. “That one I know all too well,” he exclaims at the third—an aria from The Marriage of Figaro. Here contemporary audiences laugh in appreciation, belatedly catching on to Mozart’s joke.

But is it just a joke? I have always found the moment ominous. The strings palpitate anxiously as Elvira rushes in, pleading with Giovanni to mend his ways; those palpitations turn into a propulsive rhythmic figure that traces an ascending chromatic scale as she runs back offstage. When it reaches the top, on a piercing diminished seventh chord, we hear her scream. The process repeats itself as Leporello opens the door, cries out, and slams it shut. On an expectant A-minor harmony, Giovanni reopens it. By the time the Commendatore enters—accompanied by a paroxysm of dissonance rather than the expected D-minor chord—all aesthetic distance between the drama and spectator has collapsed. Classical clarity has given way to Romantic darkness, song to a scream, the beautiful to the sublime. 

In Barlow’s production, even as the Commendatore stepped out of the frame of the painting to confront Don Giovanni, the aesthetic frame separating both of them from the audience remained intact. He advanced from stage left, at an angle to the viewer, eyes firmly fixed on his killer. In the performances I remember best, by contrast, he looks directly outward, as if passing sentence on the world. A 2001 staging at the Zurich Opera House, preserved on film, sets Giovanni’s banquet in an encroaching darkness that merges with the shadows of the auditorium. When the Commendatore’s statue appears, on a scaffold high above the stage, he is gazing into the hall, his face blank and impassive. He seems to say—not to Giovanni, but to us—that every carnival has its end.

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