Music: W. A. Mozart

Don Juan’s allegorical value is often reduced to the seduction of women in art, science and entertainment. Molière’s protagonist is significantly more complex. Throughout the story, Don Juan is accompanied by his superstitious servant Sganarelle, whose ethical stance engages the master in intellectual debates that uncover further facets of the archetype: seduction is accompanied by pseudo-altruism, cynicism, indulgence and insatiability. At the same time, Don Juan is convinced that he is a free spirit who has escaped the shackles of social and religious norms. Not surprisingly for the time of its premiere, when absolutism and a ruthless spiritual doctrine guarded social norms, Don Juan’s attributes were equated with blasphemy. Don Juan is portrayed not only as a woman seducer, but also as a spiritual seducer and hypocrite, when he tries to persuade a pious beggar to blaspheme and later feigns a spiritual rebirth. However, these peculiarities of the late 17th century do not prevent the epoch-spanning social significance of a timeless character. Even today, Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle can be seen as representatives of Kierkegaard’s colliding aesthetic and ethical possibilities of existence. Especially today, the tandem of Don Juan and Sganarelle is worth considering as an allegory of appearance and being. Is our “being” possibly a servant of our “appearance”? In our staging, we turn to two striking impulses of today’s Donjuanism, the appetite for pleasure and the related striving for the multiplication of happiness. The possibilities for self-portrayal that are available to us today largely blur the boundaries between pleasure and happiness. We strive to conserve, multiply, display and enjoy every moment that brings us happiness, rather than simply experiencing it. But can more enjoyment make us happier? The Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach warned that self-indulgence destroys everything, but notably happiness and that one has to share one’s happiness in order to be able to multiply it. Today we seem far from these aphorisms. We don’t strive for happiness, but to multiply happiness without actually having to share it. The only sharing is limited to our conveyor belt of pleasure on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook. We turn into sganarelles who serve a donjuanist appearance and lament when the “Statue of the Commendatore” threatens to drag this appearance into oblivion. Our Don Juan is an amusing demonstration of how our everyday life is controlled by a widespread misconception that happiness must be multiplied in order to enjoy it.

Music: G. Bizet

The archetype of the femme fatale has always accompanied us in mythology, art and literature. With Carmen, the protagonist of the eponymous novella by Prosper Mérimée and the opera by Georges Bizet, this archetype undoubtedly attained widespread social attention. But often, the allegorical value of Carmen is brought to the forefront of artistic creation and the entertainment industry as the sole, or at least central, merit of an exceptional work. Mérimée’s masterpiece is multi-layered and foresighted. It emerged in one of the most turbulent times of the 19th century, when liberals and traditionalists in Catholic Europe sought to enforce their own social order for the common good, but ignored the role of an invisible force. A power that trumps and outlasts even those of natural and civil liberties. The power that drives a Navarran honorable hidalgo and dutiful dragoon to become a notorious outlaw. The power that can combine honor and atrocity, unleashing empathy and resentment at the same time. The power of a sincere, unshakable, ardent and inextinguishable affection. The power of love. Mérimée immortalizes himself as a witness to this force; as a storm chaser who fearlessly penetrates deep into the interior of a force in order to discover its beauty and explain its power. And yet, he remains only an observer, a contemporary witness, a tritagonist. It is remarkable with what literary virtuosity José’s pain is shaped after his beloved Carmen falls by his own hands as she confesses that she cannot love him and wants to be free forever. Devastated, José surrenders, awaiting his death penalty. But where does the pain of a literary lover end and the emptiness of the real observer begin? “To love or to have loved, that is enough. Don’t ask any more questions. There is no other pearl in the dark folds of life,” wrote Mérimée’s contemporary Victor Hugo. No one can escape the longing for love, not even a cosmopolitan liberal like Mérimée. He describes his protagonist with a striking adaptability to conflicting norms. Transformed from lawman to outlaw and then ready to start from scratch again, he embodies a constant that prevails over both the boundless freedom of self-interest and the authority of the state. José’s unrelenting love makes him fail in two worlds, once as a dutiful lawman and then as a notorious bandit. Mérimée affirms love as a universal power that trumps worldviews. In our interpretation, it is the power that transcends epochs and never loses momentum. Because in the absence of love, the longing for it is all the more powerful.