Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

I suppose I was lucky. The first opera I got to know was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, learnt from a recording long before I ever saw it on stage. That’s a priority many romantics would have approved, certainly E.T.A Hoffmann, enthusiast for Mozart above all composers, who changed his third name to Amadeus in tribute to his idol, and called Don Giovanni ‘the opera of all operas’. But for years I stayed away from opera in the theatre, because I was prejudiced: my sister’s first opera was Madama Butterfly, which she saw and wept, arousing my male adolescent scorn. In the 20th century, Puccini's opera was probably the opera of operas, in terms of popularity and number of performances.

The two operas could hardly be more different, though in both a leading male character has an attitude to women questionable, to say the least. Puccini’s wronged heroine invites sympathy, lots of it; Mozart’s hero does not. Puccini’s emotional message is clear, Mozart’s is ambiguous, deliberately so, and that ambiguity is reflected in the genre title dramma giocoso (jocular drama – serious and amusing at once).

My sister’s reaction was better based than mine; at least she had experienced Butterfly in the theatre, whereas Don Giovanni was an idea in my head. That, it transpires, was how romantics like Hoffmann experienced this opera. Hoffmann, as Edward Dent points out, turns the Don into a superman, and Donna Anna into a superwoman, the woman destined for him by heaven, whom he meets too late. All he could do was to violate her, and from that moment she is consumed by an unearthly passion for him, requiring both his destruction and the satisfaction of her own desire.

Hoffmann puts his interpretation in a tale about a travelling opera enthusiast who finds, during a performance of Mozart’s opera, that the woman sitting in the box next to him is Donna Anna herself. Hoffmann, Dent argues, was disgusted at the idea of Don Giovanni, unless he could read into him an allegory, and he could not conceive how Mozart could have written such beautiful music unless he had some such allegory in mind. Beethoven was more honest – he simply couldn’t understand how Mozart could write an opera on so immoral a subject.

Is Madama Butterfly immoral? Composer Nicholas Nabokov tells of attending a performance of Puccini’s opera sponsored by the Russian occupying forces in Berlin just after World War. An American general sitting behind him became indignant at the choice of an opera about the caddish behavior of American naval lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. He thought it a deliberate anti-American Russian ploy!

Most people (except perhaps feminists) do not find Butterfly loathsome. But Goethe another Romantic admirer of Mozart found in Don Giovanni ‘repellent, loathsome and terrifying qualities’ – precisely the kind he thought necessary for setting his own Faust to music, because the music of his own time was too tame.

Here we are getting closer to what makes this Mozart opera so fascinating. It could be argued that the three most representative figures in Western literature are Hamlet, Faust, and Don Juan. Neither Hamlet nor Faust has ever received a musical treatment entirely worthy of Shakespeare or Goethe, in spite of many attempts. But in spite of the many versions of the Don Juan story, including Molière’s, ‘Don Juan’, as Dent writes, ‘has become Don Giovanni, and his creator is Mozart’. Is this due to Mozart's music, or to something else perhaps: to Mozart's ideas, or even those of his librettist Da Ponte?

Most musicians have no doubt, most memorably Rossini, who grew tired of being asked to name his favorite among his many operas, and took to replying: ‘Don Giovanni_.’. Gounod, whose Faust opera was the world’s most popular until Butterfly knocked it off its pedestal, called the opening scene of Don Giovanni ‘the finest exposition of an operatic drama known to me’. Beethoven, despite dismissing Mozart’s opera on moral grounds, knew it well, and quotes Leporello’s opening song in his Diabelli Variations, mixing as in Mozart comedy and high seriousness. In the theatre the music sweeps through Don Giovanni’s first four scenes with overwhelming cumulative effect (I wore out the record by playing it again and again!).

Yet the text and its structure considered apart from Mozart’s music seems quite conventional – a stock complaining servant’s ditty, then an admittedly dramatic struggle between the would-be ravisher and the ravished, a duel when the father coming to the rescue is killed, an almost comic exchange between servant and murderer-master, leading into the re-telling what has happened by the would-be seducer’s object and her betrothed, climaxing in an oath of vengeance. There is more action in this presentation than in stock-standard opera seria, and Da Ponte can claim part of the credit.

He had found the essentials of his version in a libretto by Bertati for Gazzaniga’s opera given in Venice in 1787, Il convitato di Pietro (The Stone Guest). Gazzaniga’s musical treatment already has some of the elements of Mozart’s. But Mozart obtains an effect of overwhelming energy, even running through the recitative that comes so surprisingly after the Commendatore’s dying breaths. ‘Without Don Giovanni saying a word about himself’ writes Mozart biographer Hermann Abert, this introduction ‘gives a picture of his nature and of the forces that rule it that is unsurpassable; it presents him straight away in impassioned conflict with the supreme powers of life on earth. For this single incident, as the listener senses at once, is typical of his whole previous life’.

Abert attributes this to Mozart’s music; the conventions of the text are those of opera buffa, comic opera, and there are things in it unthinkable in a tragic opera seria (like Idomeneo or La Clemenza di Tito), such as the servant Leporello chattering his comments on the action, in a different musical idiom. What made so dramatic a beginning possible was Mozart’s speeding up of the pace of opera buffa, already successfully achieved in The Marriage of Figaro. Each section is shorter and preceded by less instrumental introduction; each section, too, prepares the next, just as the overture ends in a cadence preparing the key of Leporello’s arietta.

In opera buffa are found the origins of a continuous and flexible musical treatment, instead of opera seria’s formal division into recitatives and arias. In comic opera characters could sing simultaneously, run in and out, interrupt each other in mid-sentence, and a new dramatic flexibility could develop. This diversity within continuity is found especially in Mozart's finales, such as the Act II finale of The Marriage of Fiqaro, or the Act I finale of Don Giovanni, with its trio of masked partygoers and its Minuet, Contredanse, and ‘Teutscher’ played simultaneously, for the three social levels represented at Don Giovanni’s party.

To make opera entirely continuous and integrated, all composers had to do was to stretch the methods of Mozart’s finales back to the beginning of each act. Mozart himself, in Don Giovanni, had already done this. Da Ponte’s libretto, by genially adapting his models, helped make the process possible. Most commentators have assumed, without hard evidence, that Mozart and Da Ponte must have discussed the libretti as they were written. It is a pity the two men were living in the same city – Mozart’s correspondence with other librettists reveals so much of his grasp of crafting music for the stage.

In Act Two of Don Giovanni Da Ponte was unable to maintain the great dramatic sweep of Act I. Abert points out in his study of the opera that the libretto here resorts to episodes, mainly in buffo style. Mozart knew better than his poet how to keep these connected with the main action, which is why audience interest does not flag. Nevertheless, Don Giovanni, especially in these episodes, is a difficult opera to produce for the stage. I have never seen a better handling of the master servant duets, the balcony episode and the serenading of Elvira’s servant, the irruption and routing of Masetto and his followers than in Göran Järvefelt's Drottningholm production. This makes a positive asset of the conventions of the 18th century theatre, and tries to reproduce its typical ‘business’. The audience should laugh at these antics; only then can the mysterious significance be fully felt given Mozart’s music to what is apparently conventional. The Don, as the music reveals, is most dangerous precisely because he is masterminding these episodes, while appearing to participate in them like any other buffo character. His escape from all attempts at retribution shows him a match for any mortal opponents, and he takes his bravado into the churchyard scene.

The chilling thing about the encounter with the statue is that Don Giovanni takes its words as a jest, and even refers to the Commendatore as ‘ridiculous old fool’. Leporello's superstitious and frightened reaction probably expresses what was felt by most people in an 18th century audience. Don Giovanni says ‘the scene is indeed strange’ – very true, but what does the confrontation with the statue mean? In the first place, and this is sometimes forgotten in allegorical interpretations, the statue actually is the Commendatore turned to stone; Mozart’s music makes this quite clear when his heavy steps are heard coming to supper. The Stone Guest, title of many of the theatrical versions of the Don Juan legend, indicates that this is not a ghostly apparition (as modern productions may be tempted to render it), but an 18th century stage device apparently defying reason.

But is Don Giovanni a rationalist of the Enlightenment, who ‘fears nothing because he believes in nothing’(Dent)? For a start, he clearly believes in the statue’s reality, but considers him an old bore. Intellectual big guns have taken aim at the final scene of this opera, because interpreting the rest seems to hinge on it. For Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni represents ‘life outside religion’; he boldly opts for damnation. Mozart’s conclusion, however, is that the Don is supernaturally punished – rebellion inevitably entails punishment. This is the message of the final sextet ‘This is the end of all who do wrong’– but Mozart must have known that the audience might at least admire Don Giovanni for his courage. The trombones accompanying the statue’s pronouncements serve to give his words solemnity, supporting the singer in his sententious and slow delivery. But to an audience in Vienna or Prague they inevitably would have suggested the church, the only place where trombones were regularly to be heard.

What, then, is the sin of Don Giovanni? Clearly it is more than murder; Brigid Brophy (Mozart the Dramatist) claims Don Giovanni is an opera entirely given to the theme of seduction. According to her, Mozart presents his anti-hero not, as in previous versions of the story, as a revolutionary and disbeliever, but as a parricide. The Commendatore is presented as a father who upholds the social order. The Don kills him in self-defense, and therefore does not hold himself guilty of the Commendatore’s death; the opera, however, does hold him guilty. More contentious are Brophy’s arguments that Don Giovanni’s compulsive drive to seduction asserts the Enlightenment individualist’s right to pleasure, against God, honor, and society; that dueling and seducing are attempts to defy impotence, and that seducing virgins is an attempt to affront their fathers, symbols of social order.

One soon wonders what all this psychoanalytic speculation has to do with Mozart, since most of it rests on a reading of the libretto rather than on evidence in Mozart’s music. Brophy gets closer to her theme (Mozart as dramatist) when she asks why Mozart reacted so enthusiastically to Da Ponte suggesting an opera on the ^‘reactionary’ Don Juan story, with its hell-fire message, one Mozart did nothing to minimize. Brophy’s explanation is the death of Mozart’s father Leopold between the composition of Figaro and the choice of Don Giovanni as a subject; her Freudian analysis is that the death of a loved-hated person prompts tormenting scruples in the unconscious about killing by evil wishes, which may find expression in the return of the dead one as a ghost. ‘The material and history of this legend permitted Mozart to offer an apology to his own father through the medium of offering an apology to God for the enlightenment … his propaganda for the enlightenment and for social revolt, especially in the recent Figaro … the logical amends for a son to make to a father whom he has unconsciously wished dead is to bring him back to life in deliberate fantasy... the power which animates the dead Commendatore in divine vengeance … compensating paternal authority for the sons’ murderous wishes against it … the animation of the Commendatore’s statue is a vindication of God’.

Brigid Brophy’s argument, merely sketched here, is interesting speculation, but the sense that it is ingenious psychobabble would be less if she had anchored her thesis more in the music. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (to return to my original theme) could hardly prompt such explanations – its meanings are neither multiple nor obscure. Don Giovanni cannot be separated from its interpretations, but the fascination it exerts is due to the power of music – Mozart’s. To what extent Mozart identified with his subject will always remain a mystery, at least in part. Wolfgang Hildesheimer says (much more sensibly than Brigid Brophy): ‘there is hardly a stage work in the history of the theatre whose nonsense we accept as gladly as Don Giovanni’s; for example, the apparent unity of time, and its consequence, that everything takes place at night … Interpreters and directors have naturally tried to bring some logic to this series of events, but in vain – through the music’s evocative power, the concrete action disintegrates … we do not question its probability … while we experience it everything makes sense. Our deep satisfaction lies in the inconceivability of the action, the ambiguity of its motivation, in the recognition of its mystery, not in the solution. We play at solutions, but they do not get at the thing itself’.

First published for Opera Australia, 1990