Artwork by Dane Suarez
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte
Arrangement by Husan Chun-Novak
October 8 | 7:30PM
October 10 | 2:00PM
Performances at The OperaDelaware Studios
Sung in Italian with English supertitles
Run time: 1 hour
This production is made possible through the generous support of Brad Clark.
In the intimacy of the OperaDelaware Studios, Portraits weaves together live performance, expert storytelling, and historical background to bring you closer than ever before to the music and drama. Pianist and conductor Husan Chun-Novak leads a chamber orchestra and soloists through highlights of Mozart's electrifying Don Giovanni score.
Join us at the OperaDelaware Studios and meet Don Giovanni before he meets his fate.
the creative team of Don Giovanni Portraits
Husan chun-novak, arranger and pianist/conductor
Husan Chun-Novak is a pianist and conductor who has worked for over thirty years as an assistant conductor, opera pianist, and continuo player at major theaters and festivals across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Her credits include the Theater an der Wien, the Mariinsky Theatre, Teatro Municipal de Santiago, Teatro de la Zarzuela, Palau de les Arts, and Maryland Lyric Opera, and she has collaborated with conductors such as Riccardo Frizza and Speranza Scappucci and directors including Emilio Sagi and Calixto Bieito. As a recital pianist, she has performed at prestigious venues including the Musikverein Wien and the Teatro Real de Madrid. A frequent collaborator with OperaDelaware and Opera Baltimore, here 2025 arrangement of Puccini Portraits which featured extended scenes and arias from Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and La fanciulla del West, was presented in both Maryland and Delaware to significant audience acclaim. The program was repeated when OperaDelaware hosted the 2026 Opera America Conference in Wilmington, Delaware.
Before Don Giovanni takes the stage at The Grand Opera House this October, OperaDelaware invites you to meet him up close. Don Giovanni Portraits, premiering at OperaDelaware Studios, is an intimate new reduction of Mozart's masterwork by Husan Chun-Novak and a chance to step inside the music itself before experiencing it in full scale. This is Don Giovanni stripped down to its essentials: no grand sets, no distance between you and the voices telling this story, just the score's raw psychological power in a room built for closeness.
Mozart's 1787 opera has occupied a singular place in the canon for over two centuries, and Portraits gives you the rare opportunity to see why. Meet Don Giovanni, the insatiable libertine who has spent a lifetime evading consequence, and Leporello, his servant and reluctant chronicler, who keeps a running tally of his master's conquests across Europe. Meet the women whose lives Giovanni has shattered: Donna Anna, seeking vengeance for an assault and her father's murder; Donna Elvira, seduced and abandoned, arriving in a fury of wounded dignity; and Zerlina, a peasant girl who barely escapes becoming his next victim. In this reduced format, every confrontation lands with even sharper clarity.
Don Giovanni Portraits is both a standalone evening and an invitation — a way to live inside this music in miniature before encountering its full, supernatural reckoning on the main stage. Whether you've seen Don Giovanni a dozen times or never at all, this is a chance to hear Mozart's genius laid bare, voice by voice, scene by scene, in the room where opera starts.
Synopsis
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The opera opens not with seduction, but with violence narrowly averted and then realized. Don Giovanni is discovered attempting to force himself on Donna Anna in her own home. When her father, the Commendatore, intervenes to defend his daughter's honor, Don Giovanni kills him in a duel and flees into the night. Donna Anna, finding her father's body, demands a vow of vengeance from her fiancé, Don Ottavio.
Don Giovanni's pattern repeats almost immediately. We meet Donna Elvira, a woman he has already seduced and abandoned. His servant Leporello delivers the opera's most damning piece of evidence: a literal catalogue of over two thousand conquests across four countries, recited with the procedural detachment of an inventory list. Mozart's choice to score this moment as comedy is itself an indictment; we are meant to feel the joke curdle.
At a village wedding, Don Giovanni sets his sights on the bride, Zerlina, manipulating the groom out of the room so he can work uninterrupted. His seduction is interrupted first by Donna Elvira and then by Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, who unknowingly ask the murderer himself for help identifying the murderer. By the act's close, three women he has wronged stand together and unmask him publicly. He talks his way out of it and evades punishment yet again.
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Don Giovanni trades clothes with Leporello to pursue yet another woman, leaving his servant to absorb both Donna Elvira's affection and, later, a mob's intent to kill him in his master's place. Zerlina's fiancé, Masetto, is beaten and humiliated for the crime of trying to protect his bride. Leporello is nearly torn apart by the very people Don Giovanni has wronged who mistakenly identify him as the Don.
The supernatural enters when Don Giovanni, wandering a graveyard, mockingly invites the murdered Commendatore's statue to dinner. The statue accepts.
At the final banquet, Donna Elvira returns one last time. She does not seek revenge, but comes instead to ask him to change. Don Giovanni mocks her. Moments later, the statue arrives to collect on its invitation, offering him one final opportunity to repent. Giovanni refuses. He is dragged to hell by a chorus of demons, unrepentant to the last syllable.
The surviving characters announce their plans to marry, mourn, and move on with their lives in a closing ensemble that reminds us that this is how life ends for those who live the way Don Giovanni lived.