Stripped-Down Mozart

Though best known as a film actor (Topkapi, Spartacus), playwright (Romanoff and Juliet) and radio and TV wit ("NATO? Six nations in search of an enemy!"), Peter Ustinov is also an old hand at opera. Over the past decade he has staged one-acters by Puccini, Ravel and Schonberg at Covent Garden, and in 1968 he directed a successful new version of Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Hamburg State Opera. Until that possible day when he sings and acts all the parts in Wagner's Ring cycle, Ustinov's most ambitious operatic venture will be the Don Giovanni he conceived, designed and directed for the opening of the 27th Edinburgh International Festival last week.

Ustinov's Don Giovanni turned out to be in direct proportion to the cheese-wedge of a stage in Edinburgh's 1906 King's Theater. ("Kings came in smaller versions in those days," he quipped.) Stripping away the interpretive layers of two centuries, Ustinov kept his unit set spare, his cast mobile, and his dramatic touches brief but to the point. When Swiss Bass Peter Lagger came to life spookily as the Commendatore in the second-act cemetery scene after using a yoga technique to remain motionless, there were shivers in the audience.

"When we frighten, we frighten by the simplest means," said Ustinov.

The major innovation was Ustinov's abandonment of the traditional setting of the opera--the brocaded and balconied court life of old Seville--in favor of a Goyaesque countryside vision of 18th century Spain. "Like Goya," said Ustinov, "Mozart had a fine sense of the intense dark and light sides of life, often imprisoned so tightly together that it is frightening to ask too many questions. The people in Don Giovanni could have been the people staring at you from the depths of Goya's portraits." As for the don himself, said Ustinov, he is "not really my kind of man. He has this superb kind of facile surface charm, like the Ferrari drivers of the world. Quite repellent underneath."

Though it was not an entirely successful approach--some first-nighters found Ustinov's somber lighting too unvarying, his crowd scenes too busy--Ustinov did manage to balance the bawdy with the foreboding in a psychologically adroit way. Costumes contrasted gaily and innocently with the ominous surroundings. The mood was like nothing so much as a folk festival in which the compassionate, suspicious, sacred, profane and foolish commingled.

To underline this conception, Ustinov allowed no cast bows after individual arias, no curtain calls at the end of Act I, and only one curtain call at the finale. Fine for the show, but a bit of a sacrifice for the exemplary cast (notably Roger Soyer as the don, Sir Geraint Evans as Leporello, and Heather Harper as Elvira) and Conductor Daniel Barenboim. Only seven years after rearranging a notable piano career to include the baton, Barenboim, 30, made an impressive operatic debut at Edinburgh, bringing forth from the English Chamber Orchestra a powerfully humane and often witty reading ideally geared to Ustinov's provocative ideas about the composer.

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