Emma Birski / OnP

Opera

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Opéra Bastille

from 01 February to 11 March 2022

3h25 with 1 interval

Don Giovanni

Opéra Bastille - from 01 February to 11 March 2022

Synopsis

For his second collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart would mark the history of opera with his Don Giovanni: a rake who conquers and subjugates women with the cold brutality of a predator stalking its prey. Power is at the heart of Ivo van Hove’s theatre. For this keen admirer of Shakespeare, the stage is a place where contradictory forces must coexist, even if it means plunging the audience into the realms of doubt by depriving them of their reassuring certainties. The director revisits the mythical figure of the seducer who has haunted European culture for centuries and turns him into a cruel and manipulative character undermining the social order.

Duration : 3h25 with 1 interval

Language : Italian

Surtitle : French / English

  • Opening

  • First part 90 min

  • Intermission 30 min

  • Second part 85 min

  • End

Show acts and characters

CHARACTERS

Don Giovanni: A rake who revels in female conquests
Leporello: Don Giovanni’s valet
Donna Anna: A young woman assaulted by Don Giovanni
Don Ottavio: Donna Anna’s fiancé
The Commendatore: Donna Anna’s father, killed by Don Giovanni
Donna Elvira: A former conquest of Don Giovanni
Zerlina: A young woman of modest means
Masetto: Zerlina’s fiancé

ACT I

Bemoaning his condition, Leporello stands guard while his master Don Giovanni slips into the apartments of Donna Anna, the daughter of the Commendatore. The seducer suddenly appears, pursued by the young woman seeking to confound him. Alerted by the cries, the Commendatore rushes to the scene and challenges Don Giovanni to a duel. The latter mortally wounds the Commendatore and flees. Joined by her fiancé Don Ottavio, Donna Anna swears revenge over the body of her dead father. No sooner has he escaped than Don Giovanni catches “a woman’s scent”. However, it is none other than Donna Elvira – the woman he had promised to marry before abandoning her. Don Giovanni slips away, leaving Donna Elvira alone with Leporello, who recites to her the impressive list of his master’s conquests. Don Giovanni now set his sights on a new victim: modest Zerlina, who is celebrating her future wedding with Masetto. Don Giovanni even proposes marriage to her. But Donna Elvira arrives in time to save the naïve young woman. Don Giovanni runs into Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. He quickly promises to help them exact their revenge. But Elvira returns once more and warns the couple, forcing the womaniser to retreat. In his parting words, Donna Anna recognises the voice of her father’s murderer. She tells her fiancé the details of the assault she suffered. Don Ottavio, for his part, is loath to believe a man he considers a gentleman to be guilty, however he promises either to prove Donna Anna wrong or to assist her in exacting revenge. Don Giovanni organises a grand party. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and Don Ottavio attend in masks. The womaniser, who has managed to persuade Zerlina to come, tries to seduce her. However, the girl’s cries alert the guests, who all take off their masks. Don Giovanni is forced to flee.


ACT II

Don Giovanni decides to seduce Donna Elvira’s maid. To facilitate matters, he asks Leporello to switch clothes with him and to take his place with Elvira in order to keep her at a distance. The young woman is easily fooled by Leporello, who relishes the chance to further the ruse. Don Giovanni begins a serenade but is soon interrupted by Masetto who has come with a menacing group of companions in search of the debauched womaniser. Passing himself off as Leporello, he pretends to espouse their cause, and then, left alone with Masetto, he gives him a severe beating. Meanwhile, Leporello, still in Donna Elvira’s company, catches sight of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. As he tries to slip away, he runs into Zerlina and Masetto. With the ruse uncovered, Leporello mumbles a few explanations and manages to flee. Don Ottavio, now convinced of Don Giovanni’s baseness, decides to file charges. Don Giovanni and Leporello meet in front of the Commendatore’s statue. Don Giovanni starts to tell Leporello of his latest exploits when an unearthly voice is heard. Noticing the statue, Don Giovanni orders a terrified Leporello to invite it to dinner. The statue accepts. For his part, Don Ottavio urges his fiancée to marry him but Donna Anna again resists and cites the turmoil afflicting her. Meanwhile, as Don Giovanni sits down to dine, Donna Elvira comes one last time to implore him to change his life. Don Giovanni sends her packing. The Commendatore’s statue enters in answer to Don Giovanni’s invitation and orders him to repent. Don Giovanni refuses, the earth opens up beneath him and he disappears into the fires of Hell. When Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Zerlina and Masetto arrive with the law, they can do no more than note the death of the dissolute womaniser.

Artists

Dramma Giocoso in two acts (1787)


Creative team

Cast

Orchestre et Choeurs de l’Opéra national de Paris
Coproduction avec le Metropolitan Opera, New York

Media

  • Draw-me Don Giovanni

    Draw-me Don Giovanni

    Watch the video

  • Dissolute Don Giovanni

    Dissolute Don Giovanni

    Read the article

  • Those who Remain

    Those who Remain

    Read the article

  • Podcast Don Giovanni

    Podcast Don Giovanni

    Listen the podcast

  • Don Giovanni’s skyscrapers

    Don Giovanni’s skyscrapers

    Read the article

Draw-me Don Giovanni

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:15 min

Draw-me Don Giovanni

By Octave

What is this flame that compels Don Giovanni to seduce, subjugate and conquer women one after the other, with the fervour and cold indifference of a predator securing his prey; to pursue through his conquests some obscure and ever‑elusive objective? For his second collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart was to brand the history of opera with a hot iron and forever haunt European culture. In this Libertine Punished, Kierkegaard invites us to hear “the whisperings of temptation, the whirlwind of seduction, the silence of the moment”. The Mozart-Da Ponte cycle continues with a Don Giovanni entrusted to director Ivo Van Hove. In the wake of Boris Godunov, the director, accustomed to examining the political meaning of works, presents his second production for the Paris Opera.  

Playlist


© Charles Duprat / OnP

Dissolute Don Giovanni

Read the article

An interview with the dramatist Jan Vandenhouwe

09 min

Dissolute Don Giovanni

By Simon Hatab

Mozart chose to call his opera Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (The Dissolute Punished or Don Giovanni). And yet, the 19th century ignored that periphrasis and saw in Don Giovanni both a flamboyant seducer and a subversive, liberating force. For this new production of Don Giovanni, you have chosen to go back to the original interpretation... 


Jan Vandenhouwe: It was important for Ivo [Van Hove] to present a dark and uncompromising Don Giovanni devoid of all empathy, who takes advantage of everyone around him and who has no hesitation in killing: a destructive element who challenges the social order. One has to remember the Jesuit origins of the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina – The Trickster of Seville—at a time when the theatre was supposed to have an edifying function. Don Juan is a parasite who has to be eliminated to restore the balance of the world. In fact, with Mozart, he is punished twice: first by human society—and that is the essence of the role of Don Ottavio who seeks to bring the criminal to justice—but also by the statue of the Commendatore which embodies a more metaphysical form of punishment. This last verdict is of course the more complex to grasp.

    

How do you stage a punishment that is presented as divine?

Jan Vandenhouwe: In 2005, the Austrian director Michael Haneke [in his production for the Paris Opera] opted to completely humanise the punishment of the dissolute: Don Giovanni is stabbed to death by Donna Elvira and his body is thrown out of the window by the same cleaning staff he had systematically persecuted and humiliated. As far as we were concerned, it seemed important to retain the superhuman aspect which is at the very essence of the opera: After Requiem, Don Giovanni is Mozart’s most religious score. No other composer at the time possessed such an incredible capacity to set the supernatural to music—the stone statute that speaks, Don Giovanni engulfed by the flames of Hell... It’s enough to listen to the brass and the trombones in the section for the Commendatore to be convinced that those are the sounds from beyond the grave...
 

What crimes does this metaphysical punishment penalise?

Jan Vandenhouwe: If you consider the “voice” of the punishment—namely, the statue of the Commendatore—you realise that it comes into play at two specific moments in the opera: first in the cemetery when Don Giovanni scoffs at marriage; and then again in the finale of Act II when Donna Elvira visits him to forgive him, and Don Giovanni rejects her. And here we touch on two key principles. Forgiveness is one of the underlying themes in Mozart’s operas, whether we think of Le Nozze di Figaro or La Clemenza di Tito. As for marriage, it was one of the cornerstones of the policies of Emperor Joseph II, who was the first European sovereign to legislate on the subject: back then, marriage was regarded as a symbol aimed at preserving the balance of society by curbing the excesses of the Ancien Regime.   

Jacquelyn Wagner (Donna Anna), Stanislas de Barbeyrac (Don Ottavio), Nicole Car (Donna Elvira), Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Palais Garnier, 2019
Jacquelyn Wagner (Donna Anna), Stanislas de Barbeyrac (Don Ottavio), Nicole Car (Donna Elvira), Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Palais Garnier, 2019 © Charles Duprat / OnP

Ultimately, isn’t there something in the debate which crystallizes around Don Giovanni’s character as a seducer or a predator which is evocative of the current news cycle today: On the one side, the growing chorus of voices denouncing male domination and, on the other, those who see that particular liberation movement as undermining their privileges and a threat to their freedom of expression?

Jan Vandenhouwe: The tendency to absolve Don Giovanni of his crimes first appeared in the 19th century, notably in the writings of Hoffmann: Don Giovanni henceforth became synonymous with liberation and even revolution. And yet, Mozart could not be any clearer: when he appears on stage, his first deed consists of raping a woman and killing her father. And then, a few minutes later, there he is in the street in search of a new victim... In reality, Don Giovanni does not represent modernity, but rather, all the abuses of the Ancien Regime. The “liberty” he advocates has nothing in common with the liberty associated with the French Revolution: it is that of the dominator who refuses to tolerate any impediment to his carnal pleasure. Ivo also highlights the character’s tendency to lie compulsively. if I dare say so, the problem with Don Giovanni is that he himself believes the Don Juan legend: he has convinced himself that he is capable of seducing all the women cited in Leporello’s list. And yet, in the opera, you cannot say that his exploits are very convincing. Only Elvira is in love with him. Anna rejects him and as for Zerlina, well, he tries to rape her. The only time in the work where we actually see him seducing someone is during the duet with Zerlina. But we know all too well that the young peasant girl is just the umpteenth victim to whom he promises marriage so he can spend a night with her only to abandon afterwards, just as he did with Elvira in Burgos. Besides, his endeavours ultimately end in failure. For a man reputed to have seduced several thousand women, he comes across as something of a loser...   

Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Mikhail Timoshenko (Masetto), Elsa Dreisig (Zerlina), Philippe Sly (Leporello), Palais Garnier, 2019
Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Mikhail Timoshenko (Masetto), Elsa Dreisig (Zerlina), Philippe Sly (Leporello), Palais Garnier, 2019 © Charles Duprat / OnP

Where do we find the counterweight to the destructiveness embodied by Don Giovanni?

Jan Vandenhouwe: In stark contrast to Don Giovanni, Zerlina and Masetto are the embodiment of the “natural” couple, in accordance with a notion dear to Mozart that we will find later in Die Zauberflöte: it is a pure and simple love, tinged with a hint of jealousy, eroticism, sensuality, and sexuality… It should also be noted that Masetto is one of the few characters in all of Mozart’s operas who can be described as revolutionary. In Act II, he takes up arms and raises an “army” to go in search of Don Giovanni, determined to finish off and eradicate the old system of oppression and domination that condemns women and the poor to perpetual servitude. Bear in mind, this is 1787, two years before the French Revolution and Masetto’s aria is infused with accents that evoke the revolutionary songs that were being sung by the people at that time.
Don Ottavio, for his part, is the Enlightened Man, the voice of Reason. He says his aim is to “discover the truth”: for this particular era, the reference is clear. Being a person who is respectful of the rule of law, the social contract and human rights, he represents true modernity. Contrary to what the 19th century would have us believe; he is neither weak nor tedious. To help him develop his ideas, Mozart composed two arias which count among the most beautiful that the latter ever wrote for a tenor: two arias in the opera seria style, imbued with profound humanism, which already act as a precursor for Titus. You cannot imagine a greater contrast with Don Giovanni who, strictly speaking, has no aria of his own—except for the fiery “champagne aria” and the canzonetta in Act II—yet the latter is literally “another’s aria” because he disguises himself as a valet to seduce Donna Elvira’s chambermaid.

Don Ottavio and Donna Anna represent the other couple who stand in opposition to Don Giovanni. From beginning to end, both are united by true love. Donna Anna wants Don Giovanni to be punished for the murder of her father, but she wants it done through the justice system. In stark contrast to Elvira who, consumed by her passions, cannot stop braying for revenge—to the point of wanting to tear Giovanni’s heart out—Anna strives to embrace reason. She retains complete control over her feelings: despite the fact that she has been assaulted, she never come across as a victim. For Elvira, suffering and love are just two sides of the same coin. As such, she is more akin to the sacrificial characters of 19th century novels. She is left overwhelmed and obliterated, unlike the other characters who continue to live after the death of Don Giovanni.    

Philippe Sly (Leporello), Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Ain Anger (Il Commendatore), Palais Garnier, 2019
Philippe Sly (Leporello), Etienne Dupuis (Don Giovanni), Ain Anger (Il Commendatore), Palais Garnier, 2019 © Charles Duprat / OnP

You link Don Giovanni’s excesses in a historical context with the world as it was before, the world of the Ancien Régime. What resonance does this particular character have in our contemporary society?

Jan Vandenhouwe: What seemed interesting to us about the metaphysical punishment which we talked about earlier is that it is not just a few victims who turn against Don Giovanni, it is the entire universe. There’s a book by Peter Sloterdijk—You Must Change Your Life—in which the author recalls a poem by Rilke, an episode in the poet’s life during the time he was living in Paris: While contemplating the perfection of an ancient statue, Rilke thinks he hears a voice rising out from within the stone ordering him to change his life. Using the anecdote as a starting point, Sloterdijk wonders what if anything today can still warn us and help us guide our lives and our actions at a time when religion and even art no longer take on such a role. The answer to which the philosopher arrives at is this: it is the world itself that warns us. We live in a world that never ceases to warn us—social conflicts, political gridlock, and looming ecological disaster—yet despite everything, we fail to change course. There is something extremely Don-Juanesque in that attitude, don’t you think? The Earth is opening up under our feet and we still keep walking…    

Playlist


© Charles Duprat / OnP

Those who Remain

Read the article

Don Giovanni and the others

09 min

Those who Remain

By Alice Zeniter

What is it Don Giovanni is blamed for? For taking too much pleasure in love and seduction, women and meeting others? Alice Zeniter has taken up Mozart and Da Ponte’s narrative, producing a contemporary fiction in a political rereading. A few centuries later, there is yet more conformism and even less humanism. Are we for ourselves or for others, the debate has rarely resonated with so much relevance.


He says he rejects the values that prop up the lives of everyone around him and that no one can judge him because there is nothing left in the name of which to judge him. Respect, fidelity, promises, obligations, they don’t exist for him, he says, it’s hot air, I refuse to conform to hot air. He says he is like a country that has seceded and in the little portion of land that is him, only his law prevails and that is the absence of law.

It’s difficult to work with him, to work for him, in these conditions. Frankly, I think I stay out of habit, in fact I’m not used to the rest of the world and society anymore and it would be just too hard to have to learn it all again.

Sometimes, in the evening, when we roll up our jackets under our heads and make a fire to warm ourselves, we talk about what remains if we reject the values of others. Why should we be afraid of the void, he says. And I reply that we’re not made for it, that’s all. He says we can progress, that there aren’t many things that mankind does today that were within his capabilities at the beginning. He says he’s not afraid of the void, that it’s up to him to lean right over to see what’s there, that it’s almost a duty, I don’t think so, since it’s easy for him? Yes, yes, you’re right if you want, after all it’s not my business. I can’t answer him every time. It wears me out.

Sometimes I tell him he behaves badly just because he can and that if he was in my situation, if he was a nobody, from nowhere, he’d behave a bit better, he’d toe the line. I tell him his anti-conformism, it’s a sort of conformism for the upper crust. He’s lived in luxury, he can play the tough guy. When he’s in a good mood, I get away with it. He laughs. He says: “Okay, Leporello, but how do you expect me to come from anywhere but where I do come from? My childhood dreams come from a bourgeois childhood, okay, but I didn’t have any other childhood. You can’t really reproach me for that.”

Sometimes, I also tell him that his fantasy about him being a country, it only works if he doesn’t approach other people. As soon as he touches another body, there’s a problem with frontiers, invasions and all that. I say, We’re getting into international law. It’s not the same laws. He laughs at me, he asks: “So you’ve read the Geneva Convention, have you?” And it’s true, I ain’t read it. But all the same.

I haven’t slept properly for the last two nights. It’s always like that. It gets into him, he calls, I say no and then I get up. It’s like agency work only better paid. It’s not as if I really had the choice.

If I had a house like he does, I wouldn’t sleep rough like a dog, sniffing and snooping around. I’d take it easy on my sofa with a wide screen and I’d have my mates round, even if I haven’t got many left after all these years working with Giovanni, I ain’t been back to the village very often, and I’ve missed too many evenings with the lads to get their jokes when I go back. I’ve told him that if he wasn’t going to doing anything with the place, he could just give it to me. He said: “Why not ... anyway, it’s in the middle of nowhere.” He’s talking about going to America, or Berlin or Thailand. Every day, it’s a new idea. At the beginning, I told myself it was crap. Now, I reckon he’s got so many guys after him that he’ll have a job doing anything else. Chicks as well but the chicks after a while, they give up. It’s not that they’re less tenacious, they’re just less stupid. You’ve got to be a guy to tell yourself that it’s worth chasing someone for weeks on end for questions of honour. As if it hadn’t already stuffed up your life enough finding out your wife’s cheated on you, you blow everything you got left to go running after the culprit. At first, I admit, I was more on their side. I said to Giovanni: “Obviously they’re after your hide, you got to understand them.” But when I see just how grimly determined they are... If they’ve got nothing better to do with their lives, then their lives don’t amount to much. I have trouble feeling any sympathy for them, and I have no respect, that’s for sure.

At least Giovanni, he tries stuff. I can’t say I agree with everything but there’s something impressive about it. In my old gang, lots of them have settled down because they’re fed up with looking for someone. They’ve found a girl or a guy that’s passable and they stay because it’s there, it’s on tap. As soon as the other person has their back turned, they’re dishing the dirt: he drives me mad, she drives me mad, he’s a moron, she’s hysterical. Giovanni, he’s off as soon as he sees it’s not going to work. He doesn’t hang around complaining. If it’s not nirvana, it’s ciao and give my love to your family. Sometimes people say that he’s a horndog. That it’s an illness at this stage. People say this, they don’t know shit. He doesn’t screw as much as all that, in fact. He spends too much time trying to convince the girls. Here, for instance, what are we doing? Screwing? Screwing my arse. We wait until the girl comes out. And when she does come out, she sends him packing because she’s going to get married soon and who does he think he is. He tells her that he’s camping in front of her house to admire her beauty, she tells him that he’s a tramp. We’re looking at another night in the park. It takes ages, his game. One day he said to me:

Leporello, if it was just a matter of having sex, then clearly I’d have more opportunities to do it if I was in a couple. Imagine it? If I had a girlfriend, a woman worthy of me, we’d have the whole house to jump on top of each other in and every hour of the day and night to devour each other, it would be a feast. We wouldn’t even count any more. We’d get out of bed just to get something to eat or a glass of water. We wouldn’t answer the phone. I said that sounded like the good life, what he was describing. He said: Yeah ... you fuck a lot when you’re in a couple, everyone one pretends not to know that. You fuck a lot but you meet a lot fewer people. It’s strange that meeting others interests so few people.

It wasn’t to make himself look good that he said that. I’ll witness to that. If one day, they put him inside, I’ll tell them. I’ll go to the tribunal with a smart jacket, to look serious, and I’ll tell them things that only I know about Giovanni. It’s not rubbish, his stuff about meeting people. It’s not “dating” like on the web sites. People, they’re not just dates. I’ll tell them what I’ve seen over the years. How he approaches everyone as if something could really happen between them. Men, women, old, young, whatever. He goes for it as if, inside, there could be an answer for him. The answer to what, I don’t know. Perhaps he doesn’t know either. An answer to a question that hasn’t been asked yet. And if it isn’t there, well, it doesn’t matter, we go on to the next one, thanks for trying. I’ll tell them that Giovanni’s problem is just that he doesn’t understand that other people don’t want to have tried, they want to have succeeded. They don’t necessarily know at what; they don’t know the game either, they don’t know the rules, but at the end of the day, they want to be told that they’ve won the match. The problem with Giovanni, it’s not Giovanni. It’s people.    


Playlist


L'Opéra chez soi

What is this flame that compels Don Giovanni to seduce, subjugate and conquer women one after the other, with the fervour and cold indifference of a predator securing his prey; to pursue through his conquests some obscure and ever‑elusive objective?

Podcast Don Giovanni

Listen the podcast

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" - by France Musique

07 min

Podcast Don Giovanni

By Judith Chaine, France Musique

  • In partnership with France Musique

    Read more

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" offers original incursions into the season thanks to broadcasts produced by France Musique and the Paris Opera. For each opera or ballet production, Judith Chaine (opera) and Stéphane Grant (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres.   

© Elena Bauer / OnP

Don Giovanni’s skyscrapers

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A production remembered

04 min

Don Giovanni’s skyscrapers

By Max-Olivier Ducout

Max-Olivier Ducout, head of the Scenery Workshops

“There’s little doubt that one of the reasons why this [2006] production of Don Giovanni made such an impact was the staging, which was entrusted to the Austrian director Michael Haneke. His main characteristic of course is that he comes from the world of cinema: Don Giovanni—together with Cosi fan tutte [performed in Madrid then Brussels]—are his only excursions into the realms of opera to date. For the stage design, we worked with Christoph Kanter, his long-time collaborator: he created the sets for Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Funny Games, The Pianist and The White Ribbon.

When we met in the workshops, he brought us a virtual 3D model. I remember it because, although that was already common practice in cinema, it was still fairly new to the theatre. I myself have worked in both fields and I must say that at the opera, I have a preference for physical models with volume: we need to have a concrete object in our hands to understand and appreciate the distances, the spaces, the volumes, and the backgrounds on stage.

But let’s get to the skyscraper. That part of the scenography operates according to the well-known principle of a background: it is the backdrop for the set which, for example, can represent a bucolic landscape or the rooftops of Paris. It can be a painted canvas, a bas-relief or, as with cinema, a model. The effect may be reinforced by a picture window which clearly separates the background from the rest of the space, which is the case here. The background has to respect the rules of perspective set by the distance from the lens. It is this principle which is recreated here except that the eye of the spectator substitutes for the camera.

Through the lit windows of the towers at night, we can see the interiors of the offices. We could have painted those “static scenes” on a tulle but Christoph Kanter wanted to use real pictures. So he went to La Défense one night to photograph the office buildings and he brought us a whole set of random pictures. We then enlarged the transparencies, fixed them to the buildings and lit them from inside.

Don Giovanni (Peter Mattei) on the edge of the precipice opposite Leporello (Luca Pisaroni)
Don Giovanni (Peter Mattei) on the edge of the precipice opposite Leporello (Luca Pisaroni) © Christian Leiber/OnP

This desire for reality comes out in other aspects of the set, notably in the choice of materials: Christoph Kanter wanted real stained-wood veneer and not painted plywood. It’s a source of considerable debate among scenographers: should we use the real material or a trompe-l’œil on stage? It seems to me that there is less of a risk in wanting to use real materials: clearly, the danger with theatre sets is that you end up making something that looks like a “theatre set”. But other considerations come into pla : on the one hand, it may be that the real material can’t be used because of its weight (concrete), its fragility (glass) or because of regulations (sand); and on the other, the audience at the opera is seated thirty metres from the stage so real marble can look fake while an imitation may seem more authentic than the real thing. That’s why the “sample phase” when we present the materials to the scenographer is so important. So real or imitation? I’d be wary of formulating a general rule.

But let’s get back to our skyscrapers: in his production, Michael Haneke imagined Giovanni as the CEO of the company in which the drama unfurls. As a result, he wanted his office to be located at the very top of the tower to signify the power that the job title conferred upon him. In order to create an impression of height, the buildings needed to appear to descend below the stage in such a way that the audience would never see the lower floors, even if they were seated in the second balcony. That is why we placed the towers on horizontal mirrors, to create the impression of an abyss. The only thing we had to do then was make a trapdoor close enough to the edge of the ledge not to be visible, so that the body of the reprobate could disappear when the employees fling him off the tower into the void.”

Interviewed by Simon Hatab

  • [EXTRAIT] DON GIOVANNI by Mozart (Christian Van Horn & Krzysztof Bączyk)
  • [EXTRAIT] DON GIOVANNI by Mozart (Christina Gansch & Christian Van Horn)
  • [EXTRAIT] DON GIOVANNI by Mozart (Christian Van Horn, Alexander Tsymbalyuk & Krzysztof Bączyk)
  • [EXTRAIT] DON GIOVANNI by Mozart (Christina Gansch & Mikhail Timoshenko)
  • [EXTRAIT] DON GIOVANNI by Mozart (Nicole Car)
  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 1 (Adela Zaharia)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 1 (Christian Van Horn et Christina Gansch)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 1 (Christian Van Horn)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 2 (Christina Gansch)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 2 (Christian Van Horn)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 2 (Nicole Car, Christian Van Horn et Krzysztof Bączyk)

  • Don Giovanni (saison 21/22) - Acte 2 (Nicole Car)

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Opéra Bastille

Place de la Bastille

75012 Paris

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Underground Bastille (lignes 1, 5 et 8), Gare de Lyon (RER)

Bus 29, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, N01, N02, N11, N16

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In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

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Opéra Bastille

Place de la Bastille

75012 Paris

Public transport

Underground Bastille (lignes 1, 5 et 8), Gare de Lyon (RER)

Bus 29, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, N01, N02, N11, N16

Calculate my route
Car park

Q-Park Opéra Bastille 34, rue de Lyon 75012 Paris

Book your parking spot

In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

Immerse in the Paris Opera universe

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