Kasper Holten's staging of Mozart's Don Giovanni returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 10 September 2026, Stefano Montanari conducting. Every date sold out.
Mozart and Da Ponte wrote Don Giovanni for Prague in 1787, and called it a dramma giocoso — a jocular drama — which is the only honest label for a piece that opens with a rape and a murder, spends two acts on comic business, and ends by dragging its hero into hell to trombones. Nobody has agreed since about whether he is a monster or a life force, and every staging is an answer to that question whether or not it means to be.
Kasper Holten’s answer, made for this house and returning here, puts the action inside a set of shifting projections and treats Giovanni as a man running out of room. It is one of the productions Covent Garden brings back rather than replaces. Da Ponte wrote the libretto while working on two other operas at once, by his own account with tobacco, Tokay and a young woman in the next room.
It runs on the Main Stage from Thursday 10 September to Thursday 15 October 2026. Stefano Montanari conducts; Gordon Bintner sings the title role, with Rachel Willis-Sørensen, Aigul Akhmetshina, Roberto Tagliavini and Bogdan Volkov. Sung in Italian with English surtitles, three and a half hours with one interval. Every date has gone and returns are the only route in. The first night’s curtain is at half past six, a quarter of an hour before the rest.