Gingery Giovanni

Together let us purely

Indulge a whim we surely

Are faultless to fulfill.

For nobleman and peasant

While doing what is pleasant

Cannot be doing ill.

These tinkly lyrics are not from a vintage operetta but from one of the best--and in a sense most modern--productions ever accorded Mozart's Don Giovanni. For all the Met's fine performances this year, the NBC Opera Company's TV version last week stood out as a high point of the opera season. Usually, English translations of opera have the incongruous effect of a grey flannel suit at a fancy dress ball, but this time Poet W. H. Auden and Collaborator Chester Kallman managed to provide language that was not ridiculed by the music or drowned by it; the TV microphone clearly picked out the words that, in an opera house, usually fail to cross the orchestra pit. As a result, with the exception of a few close calls on bathos, NBC's gingery Don Giovanni played almost like a new story.

In a first-rate cast under Conductor Peter Herman Adler, Bass Cesare Siepi was superb as the don, his voice smooth and resonant, his acting a marvel of revealing, reflex-quick responses to the camera's eye. In one of the opera's musical high points, the Act I love duet of Giovanni and Zerlina (Soprano Judith Raskin), Siepi gave his mahogany tones a range of inflections--ardor, indignation, surprise--that told the viewer in the twist of a phrase everything about the don he needed to know. Less effective than Siepi dramatically, Negro Soprano Leontyne Price sang the role of Donna Anna in a richly textured voice, with dead-sure marksmanship and apparent power to spare. (Her appearance caused the rejection of the show by eleven of NBC's Southern affiliates.)

The only dissonant notes in the performance were the wildly off-key plugs delivered for the Florists' Telegraph Delivery Association, which sponsored the show. Even nimble TV veterans found it difficult to switch from a mourning Donna Anna ("The shade of my father/For vengeance it cries!") to a bedridden salesman receiving a bouquet of flowrers with a happy cry: "Why, it's from the boys in the branch office!"

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