The abiding strength of Casanova is a testament not only to Argento the composer but to Argento the writer. What do the two need from each other, I ask him. "W. H. Auden once described the libretto as 'a love letter a writer sends to a composer.' For me, one of the primary purposes of a libretto is to draw out the composer's finest music, give him opportunities to write interesting, beautiful, strange, funny, poignant, exhilarating things. As for models — Hofmannsthal and Boito." The strategy has worked. "Beverly Sills came to St. Paul for the premiere. At the end of the second act, she said, 'Dominick, don't ever let anybody else write a libretto for you.'"

"For a director, Dominick is a delight," says James Robinson, the artistic director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (and one-time composition student of Argento's), who will craft the new production. (It was Robinson who helmed the triumphant new production of Argento's Miss Havisham's Fire at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2001.) "Most composers don't have Dominick's stage knowledge and dramatic instincts." Argento first observed the workings of a first-rate theater at the elbow of the estimable Tyrone Guthrie, for whose Guthrie Theatre the composer wrote several incidental scores during his early years in Minneapolis.

The story of Casanova stitches together several episodes from Casanova's life into one Venetian setting — the last week of the year 1774. A disgraced and penurious Casanova, pushing fifty, has been allowed back into La Serenissima by the city fathers, provided he can stay out of trouble. He encounters an old love, Giulietta, who is desperate to provide a dowry for her daughter Barbara, Casanova's goddaughter. Needless to say, trouble galore ensues.

With the assistance of his protégé Lorenzo — a young Lorenzo da Ponte, that is — our hero hatches a plot to maneuver Madame d'Urfé, a crazy old French aristocrat obsessed with the occult, out of a large chunk of her fortune, which would otherwise go to her nephew the Marquis de Lisle, a foppish gambling addict. But the Marquis sets a trap for Casanova, who is tricked into attempting the seduction of a castrato singer after an opera performance. The legendary lover's public humiliation is relieved by the satisfaction of seducing the singer in private: she is actually a beautiful woman, Teresa, posing as a glamorous castrato in order to support her family.

Casanova visits Madame d'Urfé, who begs her new cabalistic "Master" to transform her by way of "the Great Work" into a male infant, though his scheme (which successfully relieves her of much jewelry and gold) goes awry when the bogus "rite" on the Lagoon is interrupted by a hurricane and the principals are tossed into the cold sea. D'Urfé dies of pneumonia; Casanova is interrogated for causing her accidental death but brilliantly beats the rap. Barbara is successfully married, Casanova becomes himself again, and the citizens of Venice celebrate another riotous New Year's Eve.

Some reviewers criticized Argento for "the emptiness of his mean-spirited tale" (Greg Sandow). But considering that Madame d'Urfé's death is entirely accidental, that her money would otherwise be tossed away by a feckless gambler, that vice in the service of virtue had a long, distinguished history in La Serenissima, and that the final plot twists of Così Fan Tutte and Falstaff are at least as "mean," this seems an extreme judgment. Certainly the St. Paul audience on opening night would have agreed; their frequent bursts of laughter are preserved on tape.

"Virtually all of the plot twists are taken directly from accounts Casanova himself described. I had to invent very little," says Argento, who diligently combed through the immortal gallant's twelve-volume memoirs for his material. "The work is purposefully subtitled 'opera buffa' and intended as a homage to that form, with arias, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, choruses and recitatives with harpsichord. I'd like to believe it's rather like something Cimarosa might have written had he lived in the twentieth century."

If so, it would be a Cimarosa who had lived through the burgeoning of late Romanticism and its cleansing neo-Classical corrective, and who had made a nimble adaptation of the twelve-tone techniques that became de rigueur in American academia after World War II. "I don't remember using any serial stuff in Casanova," says Argento, and he is right: most of the opera is forthrightly, though complexly, tonal in sound. But at the exact center of the piece (when Casanova's fortunes begin to turn for the better) there is a soaring, optimistic melody made from ten pitches set over bright triadic chords, with the two remaining pitches of the chromatic scale added at the beginning of the following phrase — not literal serialism, but the kind of abstract sleight-of-ear that Argento, a onetime student of the lyrical twelve-tone master Luigi Dallapiccola, can employ with ease.

Casanova's "tone" is not postwar European, even if some of its styles and techniques are. Its warmhearted nature seeks contact with the audience, which is rewarded with a seamless flow of scenes — from piazza to opera house to gambling den, for example, all in one act — in which affecting solo arias (Casanova's Act I entreaty to Teresa, accompanied by harp, is as fine as anything in Britten) are linked by vigorous, transitional ensemble numbers. These are appropriate to the opera's setting, since Venice, the most "small-town" of the great cities, has always been a place where everyone gossips about everyone else's business. But then, every Argento opera is a unique creation that conjures up a world of its own. In an interview with this writer for Yale's Oral History American Music program, he maintained, "I like the idea of [writing] a phantasmagoric opera like The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, and then a rather romantic opera like The Aspern Papers, as much as an opera buffa like Casanova or a surreal one like Postcard from Morocco. I hate the idea of imitating Massenet, where you can't tell one from the other."

Despite his reputation as a "romantic," Argento is in fact an ardent classicist who keeps tight control over his material. Act I of Casanova is profoundly synthetic, with musical sentences and paragraphs intricately plotted and perfectly timed. At the opening, three carnival types (a mountebank, a charlatan and an orange-seller) boisterously sing out motifs that will be prominent in the rest of the piece. One, a leaping idea based on a major sixth ("Who will try?"), is, as New York magazine's Peter G. Davis wrote in his City Opera review, "a tiny but exuberant G major motif that we eventually recognize as the motto of the opera … and the musical embodiment of Casanova's life-enhancing philosophy." Casanova's first aria, in which he explains his philosophy to his apprentice, contains a whole network of motifs that, in later scenes, surround the vocal lines with a delicate but supportive web of instrumental counterpoint.

More modern-sounding — but ultimately Mozartean — is Act I's second scene, which takes place in the Teatro San Benedetto, where excerpts from Jommelli's opera seria Demofoonte are performed while the Marquis plots Casanova's downfall and Casanova bathes in the beauty of Teresa, the supposed castrato. Act III contains another limpid bit of layering, that of a gondolier's song (in Venetian dialect almost too lusty for translation) over the bedroom-farce recitative of a Casanovan afternoon. Remarking on Argento's mastery of libretto and music, Robinson praises the opera's "real sense of separate characters…. So many modern composers all seem to make operas in which different characters seem to sing in the same tone of voice." And indeed, each player goes through Casanova with a package of music that seems utterly his or her own (e.g., Madame d'Urfé's histrionic, chromatic slides, the Marquis's interlocking chains of dominant-seventh chords), all sung with scrupulous attention to the rhythms of speech that no other English-speaking composer can presently match. As with his idol, Mozart, Argento's eclecticism creates unity rather than dispelling it.

Casanova set design by Steinberg for Minnesota Opera Set designs by Paul Steinberg / Courtesy Minnesota Opera / Photos by Theresa Murray