Search Results

This chapter discusses the entire opera Don Giovanni, which explores the liberal, individualist component of the modern outlook. Don Giovanni, the embodiment of limitless desire, is one of perhaps only two mythical figures born of the modern age (the other being Faust), a figure of the liberal Lockean strand within modernity that accepts and celebrates our endlessly acquisitive stance. Absolute, unlimited freedom, however, defeats any attempt to create a coherent self or a community. Don Giovanni's is a story of how the foundations of human individual and collective autonomy were laid, one which bears comparison with The Marriage of Figaro on the one hand, and of the Passion, on the other. It also bears comparison with the story of Goethe's Faust, a figure driven by will to power rather than merely erotic desire.

Donna Anna responds to Giovanni's criminal trespass, vowing that she will bring him into custody or else die in the effort. It is she whose desire for vindication remains constant throughout the opera. In Don Giovanni, Donna Anna's haunted and haunting presence throughout the opera challenges spectators, performers, and scholars alike. Her dual role—as both grieving victim and clarion-voiced agent of retribution—is one of many factors that keep the opera from fitting comfortably into the comic-opera category. In most cases, the critical hostility stems from two distinct but related biases about what is appropriately “feminine” in opera. Before introducing the main proponents of the ironic, hidden-passion reading of Anna's character, this chapter considers her literary predecessors in earlier versions of the Don Juan story, some of which evidently influenced Da Ponte's libretto.

Excessive sensibility and an imprudent nature ensnare Donna Elvira in a cycle of humiliation, whether she wants to kiss Giovanni or kill him. Seduced and betrayed by Don Giovanni, Donna Elvira launches a vigorous campaign against his treachery in act 1, but her rancor eventually dissolves into pity and renewed adoration. She is exactly the kind of “undone” woman that opera celebrates and destroys, and is already more object than subject, the focus of Giovanni's obvious arousal and Leporello's wry asides.

Pauline Viardot-Garcia purchased of the autograph of Don Giovanni in London in 1855 whereupon it was associated with a number of ritualistic discourses comparable with very few such documents before or since. Its treatment rendered it as sacred as the treatment of the “Twelfth Mass” made the latter secular. Viardot preserved the document in an artifact that was as close in construction to a reliquary that its nature would allow, and treated it as a shrine. Visitors to her homes in Paris and Baden-Baden behaved exactly as if they were in the presence of a relic: Rossini genuflected and Tchaikovsky claimed to have been in the presence of divinity. When the manuscript was donated to the library of the Conservatoire in 1892 its sacred and national characteristics were elided. By this time, the autograph of Don Giovanni had contributed substantially to the ongoing nineteenth-century project of enshrining Mozart.

It is no surprise that among the women of Don Giovanni, Zerlina is generally the critical favorite. Quite simply, she is easy to like. In contrast to Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, the country girl seems almost always to be smiling. Hers is arguably the happiest ending in the opera: Don Giovanni gives her some pleasure, but he is never able to do her lasting harm. By and large, peasant and servant girls fare poorly in the Don Juan tradition, quickly conquered and quickly forgotten. Zerlina, however, not only lands on her dainty feet, but plays a central role in the drama: she is the only woman in the opera who incontrovertibly refuses Don Giovanni's sexual advances, even after having once welcomed them. She takes a chance on the charming Giovanni, but later recoils, offering her best melodies with no apparent regrets to her roughshod, devoted beau, Masetto.

George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman has been a recurrent topic in studies of the reception of Mozart's Don Giovanni, but was preceded by “Don Giovanni Explains” (1887). Shaw humorously argues Don Giovanni's case: the Don is misunderstood and unfairly reviled. The story can be read in a number of ways: autobiographically, centennially, as a response to less favorably disposed Mozart critics in late-Victorian London, or as an elaborate working note towards Man and Superman. Shaw's story parodies E.T.A. Hoffmann's much better-known text “Don Juan: eine fabelhafte Begebenheit,” and carefully imitates the pretext, scenario, focus, narrative and supernatural context of Hoffmann's story, and in doing so contributes a skeptical Victorian's critique of German romantic fiction.

As we may observe in the play Don Giovanni, Leporello, despite his many statements and attempts of leaving his master, was never really able to push through with his plans of leaving. This is because the Don, Leporello’s master, had directive authority—the ability for one to make things happen through employing his vision of certain things on others. Directive authority can be derived from not just power and brute strength but also, in some instances, even charm, charisma, and forcefulness. The lack of directive authority possessed by Leporello is also shared by those who judge the Don because more often than not, the judgments made about the Don are negative. Despite all the negative connotations associated with the Don, these barely have impact on the Don’s actions as he continuously pushes through with his allegedly evil doings.

This chapter criticizes Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden's translation of the opera The Rake's Progress, Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. It suggests that Auden's translation of the opera has given the lie to his earlier pronouncements that the verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer and that in opera the orchestra is addressed to the singers not to the audience. It contends that The Rake's Progress has overcome the label of being merely an exercise in imitation because its music, especially music wedded to words, offered a chance for something different.

This chapter presents detailed readings of several celebrated ensembles—specifically the Figaro Sextet, the Idomeneo Quartet, the Don Giovanni Quartet, the first-act Figaro Trio, and the Don Giovanni Sextet. It aims to show the distance Mozart could put between himself and traditional formal patterns when the dramatic occasion required to show that linear, future-oriented time can acquire a variety of highly individual shapes.

The early London reception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (which received its British premiere in 1817) coincided with the brief but phenomenal success of Tom and Jerry (the protagonists of Pierce Egan’s Life in London, first serialised in 1820). By examining both Egan’s urban picaresque and a stage adaptation by William Thomas Moncrieff (who had previously burlesqued Don Giovanni) this chapter reveals the ways in which supposedly realistic representations of contemporary London drew on the character, habits, and music of Mozart’s antihero. In particular, it emphasises a shared obsession with youthful masculine vigour and with getting around town in search of fashion and fun. The journeys of Tom and Jerry and Don Giovanni were integral, it is argued, to their identities and, for a time, all three were fellow theatrical travellers. Yet, even before the end of the 1820s, the canonisation of Mozart’s opera was beginning to extract Giovanni from the Cockney context of Egan’s creation. Their brief conjunction provides an opportunity to understand better how the operatic geographies of 1820s London stand as monuments to an impossible city, one in which the pursuit of pleasure knew few bounds and the last word in realism was a masquerade ball.

This chapter considers the opposition to fascism. For instance, Don Giovanni Minzoni, parish priest in Argenta, massacred by the fascists on August 23, 1923, was among the first who understood the fundamental truth that fascism offends Christian conscience. During World War I, Minzoni served as a military chaplain. Notwithstanding this terrible trial, he continued to understand the word of Christ as a teaching of liberty and democracy. Whereas the Vatican was engaging in ever-closer rapprochement with the regime, other Catholics penned calls encouraging people to fight fascism. Igino Giordani, who in 1925 published Rivolta cattolica (Catholic revolt), with the Piero Gobetti Press, was one of these writers. In his text, Giordani openly urges Catholics to revolt, in the name of their faith, against the anti-Christian religion of fascism.

This chapter provides a general introduction to the Maritain-inspired NeoThomist resonances in Lourié’s writings on music and in the opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, balancing Lourié’s Eurasianist eastward look with his immersion in Western intellectual traditions via Jacques Maritain. The chapter seeks to supplement the interpretations of Lourié as Futurist, Acmeist, Symbolist, and neoclassical composer with a consideration of his Catholicism. The chapter probes and parses the extant correspondence between Lourié and Maritain and their like-minded writings on musical aesthetics (specifically their theories of melody) before moving to Lourié’s ill-fated final opera and the inspiration provided by Mozart’s Don Giovanni—as interpreted by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his magnum opus Either/Or. Emerson also considers how and why Lourié’s companion and librettist Irina Graham downplayed the Maritain dimension of Lourié’s aesthetics.

This chapter presents Camille Saint–Saëns’ letter to George Docquois, telling him the reasons for not writing a preface to introduce Docquois’ poetical thoughts and collected verse plays. It holds that is generally acknowledged that writers, without knowing anything about music, are qualified to judge it, but that musicians on the contrary, however literate they may be, have no rights in the field of literature.

Although Mozart’s librettist for Don Giovanni, Lorenzo Da Ponte, explicitly invoked Dante’s Inferno as a source of his inspiration, both text and music tell a much more ambivalent story. The parts of the action familiar to its first audiences (the night-time escape and duel, the country maid, the statue of the dead Commander coming to dinner) were complicated by Don Giovanni’s persuasive, even heroic music and the hyper-dramatic self-justifications by his would-be conquests. Chronicling the Don’s last day, the opera focuses on his behaviors both nonchalant and impassioned as well as the inability of patriarchal norms and punishments to contain him. The opening scene, the episodic introduction of the women, and the serenade in Act II are seen here as telling examples of Mozart and Da Ponte’s desire—as in their other two collaborations, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte—to accommodate a serious moral tale to the poignant delights of comic opera. They reveal a vision of the Don beyond good and evil.

The year 1788 was a difficult one for the Austrian Monarchy, as the first campaign of the war against the Ottoman Empire ended inconclusively. Joseph II and Archduke Franz were away from Vienna, serving with the army. With persistent rumors that the opera buffa troupe was to be disbanded, the Vienna stage was affected by declining attendance rates. Against this background, Don Giovanni faced additional obstacles: the very late arrival of the new prima donna; the pregnancies of two leading singers; the poor reception accorded to newly recruited tenor and bass performers. In August, Joseph II finally announced that Italian opera would be discontinued at the National Theater at the end of the season. He returned to Vienna at the end of the year, a seriously ill man.

The onset of the Austro-Turkish War had a major impact on opera in Vienna, as Joseph II decided on economic grounds to close one of his two companies, bringing to an end two years of intertroupe rivalry. His choice fell on the Singspiel ensemble which was instructed to disband. On the political front, two dynastic Habsburg marriages had to be scheduled in haste: between Archduke Franz, nephew of Joseph II, and Elisabeth von Württemberg, who was sponsored by Catherine the Great of Russia, and between Maria Theresia, the emperor’s niece, and Prince Anton of Saxony. Three festive operas were commissioned: Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana, Salieri’s Axur, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In the growing political turmoil, Mozart’s commission was not ready in time, and Joseph II ordered that Figaro be given instead.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, long in the repertoire of the Théâtre-Italien, has now arrived at the Opéra—in French, as required by that theater. The box-office success of a work so “expressive, dramatic, and true,” so intellectually strong, is a sign, for Berlioz, of progress in middle-class musical taste. The work itself offers a lesson in taste to composers, he says, who in their search for novelty or effect, overuse the orchestral brass and percussion (Berlioz wants those potent resources fresh for audience ears when his turn comes to unleash them!). On the whole, the Opéra performances vastly outshine those of the Théâtre-Italien, especially the grand finale, now given its due. Berlioz ends with praise for the new administration at the Opéra, on whom he pins his own operatic hopes.