Music - Peter Conrad enjoys a devilishly phallic performance of Don Giovanni
Imagine, if you like, a singing penis. I refer to the hero of Mozart's Don Giovanni, who is less a person than a personified organ. It is impossible to analyse Giovanni's character, because he never pauses for thought, and leaves a vapour trail of interrupted seductions, gabbled recitative and brief, discarded melodies behind him. A baritone who takes on the role can only play himself, which is the equivalent of unzipping. Dimitri Hvorostovsky's Giovanni is a sleek, beguiling playboy, Thomas Hampson's is a haughty narcissist; and at the Royal Opera, in Francesca Zambello's new production, Bryn Terfel plays Giovanni as a brawling rugger thug.
It is a brave, forceful and visceral performance, an apt sequel to Terfel's gross and slobbering embodiment of Verdi's Falstaff, with which the new theatre at Covent Garden reopened in 1999. This Giovanni has the greedy, unsocialised table manners of Falstaff and gobbles food from the floor like a dog; he also, when he lets his scarlet waistcoat sag open, displays the treacherous onset of a paunch. Terfel's Falstaff lived in an insanitary bed, like an elderly child comforted by its own mess. His Giovanni, oddly for a man who exists to be sexually alluring, is just as indifferent to his toilet. He has the vulpine beginnings of a beard and a hippy's mane of lank hair. Although Maria Bjornson's set provides him with a shabby palace to live in, he looks as if he would rather make his home in a cave.
His conquests are brutish and obscenely brisk, never elegant. He signals his frustration after the failed rape of Donna Anna (a moving, mournful Adrianne Pieczonka) by screwing his hand into a fist and pumping the air; he sniffs the discarded veil of Donna Elvira (Melanie Diener, unsensual and overly dignified) with a gusto suggesting that he would find her undies even more aromatic. Only the peasant girl Zerlina (the delectable Rebecca Evans) is treated with grave courtesy, which may be because the libertine is seditiously mocking social order - or perhaps it's just that Terfel and Evans are both Welsh.
Women, however, are a distraction. This Giovanni is more interested in killing than in making love. He stabs Anna's father rather than feigning a duel, then slices through his jugular vein for good measure; after this, he couples with the old man's corpse on the floor, rolling in its rigid embrace and devoting more time to posthumous foreplay than he does with any of his live female partners. "Muori! Muori!" he barks when he invites the calcified ghost to dinner, practising thrusts with a sword and dagger as he does so. It is a threat to his servant, but also a command he issues to himself: glowering and joyless, Terfel seems to imply that, for Giovanni, sex rehearses self-annihilation. He reacts with desperate excitement, rather than his customary gruff contempt, when the statue summons him to its realm. Here at last is the ultimate test, the final taboo, more challenging than all those casual, scrambled acts of intercourse. As flames seethe from beneath the stage, Terfel's great voice rings out in defiance, thundering through the vast emptiness of the theatre as he refuses to repent.
Hell does not terrify him, because it is his natural habitat. After the survivors cheer themselves up in their moralising epilogue, Zambello adds a subliminally glimpsed epilogue of her own devising: Giovanni, warmed by the flames of damnation, is seen copulating with the maid to whom he earlier sang his ineffectual serenade (in which he claims that he is ready to die to win her).
Zambello's other inventions are less persuasive. Because Terfel is so violent, using his voice like a whip (and sometimes, it must be admitted, like a blunderbuss or a cannon), it seems unnecessary to load the stage with so much extra weaponry. The spurned Elvira sports a rifle, as if she were an urban guerrilla on the prowl; organising a lynch mob to corner Leporello (Alan Held), the other characters menace him with an axe, a carving knife and a firing squad's worth of guns, even though he already has a noose looped around his neck.
As a woman directing an opera about priapism, Zambello feels obliged to propose an intermittent, inconclusive feminist critique. Anna and Zerlina team up in a support group for the bereft Elvira, rather than leaving her alone during her demented aria. For some reason, the wind band that plays onstage during Giovanni's two orgies consists entirely of women, dressed in rococo finery despite the dishevelment of the partying mob: are they angels, presiding over the hero's downfall? A statue of the Virgin Mary, propped high on a wall, beatifically extends her arms over the unvirginal doings below, and Giovanni once or twice glances up at her in disgruntlement when things go wrong. As Freud's colleague Otto Rank sagely suggested in Die Don-Juan Gestalt, the rampant Giovanni begins by killing a father figure because the woman he most obsessively desires is "the unattainable mother".
Colin Davis, conducting, sympathises with Terfel's belligerence. The score may revert to the 18th century and reacquire grace when Charles Mackerras conducts the second run of performances, starting on 18 February; meanwhile, this is a Don Giovanni driven by the elemental fury of 19th-century Romanticism. In that second run, Simon Keenlyside leads an entirely new cast. The archetype is a man with a thousand faces, so (to judge from his recording, which has the versatile, inexhaustible Terfel as Leporello) you can expect a different Giovanni from Keenlyside - better-behaved, coldly cruel rather than rabid, certainly more dapper and perhaps a little duller. But there really is no replacing Terfel. The devil is a hard act to follow.
Don Giovanni is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), until 28 February
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