Two sopranos and a mezzo bring 21st-century attitudes to an 18th-century opera

Pasatiempo spoke with the three women playing Zerlina, Donna Elvira, and Donna Anna about changing attitudes toward the opera’s title character, Don Giovanni, how they incorporate contemporary viewpoints in developing their characters, risk-taking in building a career, and screaming in opera (the good kind).

Liv Redpath, Zerlina

Redpath was a 2017 Santa Fe Opera apprentice, but her introduction to the program came a decade earlier, when the then-high school student attended a performance by several apprentices in the piano bar at Vanessie Santa Fe. “I remember thinking, ‘If I could ever get into this apprentice program, I would be on cloud nine!’ By the time I did, those performances weren’t happening anymore, and I was so bummed out.”

Redpath must have bounced back from the disappointment quickly because she was offered the high-flying role of Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos here in 2018. She’s often returned to the stratosphere since then, with multiple portrayals of the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor (Metropolitan Opera and Hamburg State Opera, among others), Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet, and Tytania in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Redpath first saw Don Giovanni about five years ago in Berlin. “It was very compelling and a little bit frightful. It’s really a troubling plot,” she says, “with its 18th-century attitudes toward sexual politics and how class privilege interacts with them. We understand more now about what privilege buys people. We [the opera’s three female characters] don’t want him, we want what he stands for. The world is still peopled with individuals who hold that card.”

Zerlina seems like a role a young soprano would sing earlier in her career, but Redpath, who is in her early 30s, says, “I’m glad I’m coming at this as more of an adult now. [Mozart and Da Ponte] have a complex understanding of humanity, and the three women are each complex. It’s not black and white, as some pieces are. You have to really understand their situations and what their lives are like to understand why they make the choices they do.”

Redpath also has to navigate the tricky issue of possible sexual violence in a scene with her groom-to-be Masetto. He’s angry with her for her perceived attraction to Don Giovanni, and to placate him, she says he should vent his anger by doing anything he wants to her. The first stanza in her subsequent aria is:

Beat me, beat me, my Masetto.

Beat your poor Zerlina.

I’ll stay here like a lamb

And await your every blow.

“I think the aria is completely calling his bluff,” Redpath says. “Masetto is really a drama king, and she knows how to speak his language. She’s saying, ‘Oh, wow! Come on and do whatever you need to do. I know you get angry and dramatic, but you just need to take a breath.” It works, too. He’s much calmer and more collected by the aria’s end.

Redpath thinks of Zerlina as a Susanna-in-training, referring to the clever and confident servant who drives much of the plot in The Marriage of Figaro; it’s a role she’ll be performing here next summer.

Part of the parallel she sees between Zerlina and Susanna is the inversion of the stereotypical male/female relationship. “Zerlina is a prototype for the public secret that, in relationships, women are often the ones in power,” she says. “She’s the right woman for him because she pushes that boundary. She says, ‘No, you’re not going to freak out about this. It’ll be okay. Yeah. I’m the boss. You just got to put your faith in me.’”

“As a woman, no matter who I’m playing, it’s important for me to serve them as the smartest, most compassionate person that the libretto could allow them to be,” Redpath says. “Overall, I try to make them as confident as possible.” That notion extends to the physical characterization she’s developing for Zerlina, whom she sees as being unafraid of Masetto and as never having been harmed by him.

Redpath has an especially nuanced appreciation for texts, librettists, and the context in which operas were created, for an unexpected reason. Her undergraduate degree is a B.A. in English from Harvard University. “I think my degree just helps me immerse myself even more in that which I find so deeply rewarding,” she says. “If you just sing the notes, there’s a lot that can pass you by. When you know [what’s behind them], it changes the color of what comes out of your mouth.”

Rachael Wilson, Donna Elvira

Wilson is a native of Las Vegas (not ours, the other one) who studied at The Juilliard School, then launched her career as a studio member of the Bavarian State Opera and as a Stuttgart State Opera ensemble member.

In addition to Donna Elvira, which will be her American operatic stage debut, Wilson’s current season includes Lola in Cavalleria Rusticana at the Royal Opera House and the title role in Carmen for Switzerland’s Theater Basel.

For decades Don Giovanni was portrayed as suave, debonair, and understandably irresistible, someone every man in the audience wanted to emulate and every woman secretly hoped to meet. Nowadays, not so much. “He’s a terrible person,” the young mezzo-soprano says. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell this story or the topic is no longer relevant.”

It quickly becomes apparent when speaking with Wilson that she embraces ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk-taking, in her stage characters and in some aspects of her career choices. “What would bother me most with Don Giovanni is for the characters to be too one-sided,” she says, “like when Elvira is just being pictured as a kind of nut case. I want the women in the story to be more diverse and multidimensional.”

If you’re surprised to see “mezzo-soprano” in conjunction with “Donna Elvira,” you should get over it. The stratification of vocal categories that dominates today’s music world didn’t exist in Mozart’s time. The title role in Don Giovanni, for instance, has been successfully sung by tenors, baritones, bass-baritones, and basses.

“A lot of singers get really wrapped up around the security of knowing their voice type and wanting to have a structure,” she says, “because it’s such an unstructured kind of career. I find that really limiting. I find that the more I experiment, the more things I find that are really good fits.”

Before the opera begins, Elvira has been seduced and then abandoned by Giovanni. In her entrance aria, she essentially says that if she can’t make him love her, she’ll kill him. Asked which one Elvira really wants, Wilson says, “I don’t think she really knows. There’s that really fine line between love and hate. I think it’s more about wanting to feel powerful when she’s been put in such a powerless situation.”

While this is Wilson’s second Don Giovanni, it’s the first in which the epilogue will be performed. In it, her passionate character suddenly vows to go into a convent. Why? She doesn’t want to get too specific until she and her colleagues get further into the opera’s staging. But, she says, “Elvira has just spent a whole day being verbally abused by Leporello as well as Giovanni. So it could be a desire to find somewhere safe and secluded, a way of saying ‘I am so done with men.’”

During the Act II finale, Wilson’s character has one of the most famous screams in opera, when Elvira sees the ghost of the Commendatore. It was long performed as much more sung than screamed, an unconvincing descending scale starting on a high A flat. “I experimented with that a lot in Malmö. You’ve just run offstage and you’re worked up and so sometimes I’d go for a real scream and think, ‘Oh, that was a little too harsh vocally.’”

On the other hand, as she points out, “You don’t want to just sing it like a note. Opera is a lot like a controlled scream, right? How we scream in real life starts at one pitch and usually goes a little higher, so I’ll add some more vocal color at that point and then let it fall out of the voice on the way down.”

Teresa Perrotta, Donna Anna

As an apprentice here in 2021, Perrotta was a memorable Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She returned the following summer for two performances of Alice Ford in Falstaff, then joined Washington National Opera’s young singer program.

While she was there, Perrotta had her own 42nd Street moment in the fall of 2022. “I got the call that one of the maids in [Richard Strauss’ fiendishly difficult] Elektra hurt her ankle. They said, ‘Can you learn the role in a day and perform it tomorrow?’ Of course I said yes! I just graduated the program,” the 29-year-old told Pasatiempo, “so that’s the end of my artist training era.”

Perrotta does a great deal of reading and research in preparing for a role, along with mastering the music and the words. “I’ve read every Don Juan version I could get my hands on,” she says, “and I think I’ve got 10 books on Don Giovanni.”

On the flip side, to find the emotional core of her character, she likes to focus on the universal aspects of what she’s going through. With Donna Anna, that means focusing on how someone handles extreme grief and trauma, especially for the first time.

“This is the worst day by far in her entire life,” Perrotta says, with her father killed trying to protect her. “It leaves her an orphan in an incredibly challenging world.”

Perrotta also must decide whether her character is truthful when recounting for Don Ottavio what happened with Don Giovanni in her bedroom earlier that evening. It takes place in a very dramatic recitative with a stormy orchestral accompaniment, to such text as “Silently he approached me and tried to embrace me … I screamed, but no one came!”

Valid reasoning can support either assumption, and Anna’s first line of text, directed to Giovanni, is ambiguous: “Unless you kill me, there’s no hope that I’ll ever let you go.”

Perrotta understudied Donna Anna at the Chautauqua Opera in 2018. “I had a different opinion about it then. I thought she had led him on,” she says, and then felt guilt and anger after he left. “Now I lean toward it being the truth. She’s being vulnerable in the moment and her [increasing agitation] is because Ottavio doesn’t believe her at first.”

Asked what it’s like to be reunited with Harry Bicket, the company’s music director who conducted A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Perrotta replies, “Oh my gosh, I’m so spoiled. He’s not just an amazing conductor, he’s a great educator.” She cites his work with the cast on dynamics (changes in volume) and the “why” that’s behind them for their characters, and that he’ll often offer options for how something could be sung. “He knows it so well that he has great ideas that we bounce back and forth to make it flow,” she says. 

Mark Tiarks studied opera and theater in London as a Watson Foundation fellow, then served in leadership positions with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Chicago’s Court Theater, Chicago Opera Theater, and the Santa Fe Opera.