Don Giovanni

• 1. Introduction

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  Don Giovanni opened at the National Theatre of Bohemia in Prague on the 29th of October 1787, and within days the city's newspapers were declaring that Prague had never heard anything like it. That rapturous reception began a story that has never really ended. More than two centuries later, this opera about a charming, violent libertine who refuses to repent even as supernatural forces drag him to hell is still performed on the world's great stages, still argued over by philosophers, and still plundered by composers for raw material. Its full title is Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, which translates roughly as 'The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni.' That subtitle promises a moral lesson. What the opera actually delivers is far more complicated. Who was Don Giovanni, and why has this particular telling of his story gripped audiences for so long? What does it mean that the opera's most celebrated aspect is the moment its hero refuses salvation? And why did Mozart himself catalogue it simply as opera buffa, a comic opera, when it contains a murder in the opening minutes and ends with demons dragging a man to hell?

• 2. A Legend Reimagined

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  The character at the heart of this opera is centuries older than Mozart. Playwright Tirso de Molina set the definitive version of the Don Juan legend in his 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, and that story of an aristocratic seducer who kills a nobleman and later taunts his victim's statue had been circulating European stages ever since. When Mozart's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte sat down to write the text for this opera, he worked from a more immediate source: Giovanni Bertati's libretto for an opera called Don Giovanni Tenorio, which had premiered in Venice early in 1787, just months before Mozart's version. Da Ponte borrowed at least two structural choices from Bertati directly: opening with the murder of the Commendatore, and keeping the setting vague. Bertati had set his version in Villena, Spain; Da Ponte simply wrote 'city in Spain.' The subject may have had a particular resonance in Prague because that city had a claim to being the birthplace of the Don Juan opera sub-genre. The commission itself came to Mozart after a triumphant earlier visit to Prague in January and February 1787, and the production was originally scheduled to premiere on the 14th of October of that year, as entertainment for Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria. The opera wasn't ready in time. Le nozze di Figaro was performed instead, and Mozart recorded the completion of Don Giovanni on the 28th of October, the night before it finally reached the stage.

• 3. Sounds Within Sounds

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  The score Mozart wrote for Don Giovanni is unlike almost anything else in the operatic repertoire. The forces he called for include double woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones reserved exclusively for the second act, timpani, strings, and a basso continuo of harpsichord and cello for the recitatives. For the ballroom scene that closes the first act, Mozart devised something genuinely strange: two additional chamber orchestras performing onstage simultaneously with the pit orchestra, each group playing in a different metre. One plays a stately 3/4 minuet, one plays a 2/4 contradanse, and one plays a fast 3/8 peasant dance, all at once, accompanying the different social classes of characters dancing separately on the same stage. In the second act, Don Giovanni serenades a woman with a mandolin, accompanied by pizzicato strings, keeping the texture intimate and deliberate. The Commendatore's two supernatural warnings in the same act are accompanied by a wind chorale of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and trombones, with cellos and basses drawn from the string section: a sound that belongs to no human gathering, arriving from somewhere outside ordinary time. During the dinner scene near the end of the opera, the pit orchestra plays music from three other operas that audiences of 1787 would have recognized immediately: Vicente Martin y Soler's Una cosa rara from 1786, Giuseppe Sarti's Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode from 1782, and finally Mozart's own The Marriage of Figaro from 1786.

• 4. The Vienna Revision

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  Mozart supervised a second premiere, in Vienna on the 7th of May 1788, and the changes he made to fit the new cast are still shaping performances today. For the tenor Francesco Morella, he composed a new aria for the character Don Ottavio, 'Dalla sua pace,' catalogued as K. 540a and written on the 24th of April 1788. For the soprano Caterina Cavalieri, who sang Donna Elvira, he wrote 'In quali eccessi, o Numi... Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata,' catalogued as K. 540c, composed on the 30th of April. A new comic duet between the servant Leporello and the peasant girl Zerlina, 'Per queste tue manine,' catalogued as K. 540b, was composed on the 28th of April and added to the Vienna production. Mozart also cut a substantial section from the finale: a passage in which all the surviving characters reveal their plans for the future. To keep the moral of the story landing without interruption, he wrote a new version of a connecting passage so that the line about the ghost could flow directly into the opera's concluding verdict on evildoers. These Vienna cuts are almost never performed in theatres today. A separate consequence of the Vienna libretto is that the final ensemble of singing characters, the piece that delivers the opera's explicit moral, did not appear in the printed version used there; 19th-century memoirs suggest it was only performed once, at the very first Prague performance, before disappearing from the original run entirely.

• 5. Philosophers and Provocations

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  Søren Kierkegaard, writing under a pseudonym in his book Enten - Eller, declared that among all classic works Don Giovanni stands highest. Charles Gounod called it 'a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection.' Gustave Flaubert placed it alongside Hamlet and the sea as 'the three finest things God ever made.' What drew these thinkers to an opera about a serial predator? Partly it was the finale: Don Giovanni's refusal to repent, even with hell opening beneath him, transformed him in the eyes of certain writers from a mere libertine into a figure of almost philosophical defiance. George Bernard Shaw parodied the opera in Man and Superman, with explicit reference to Mozart's music for the finale scene between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni. E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote a short story called 'Don Juan' in which the narrator encounters Donna Anna and describes Don Giovanni as an aesthetic hero rebelling against God and society. Playwright Peter Shaffer used the opera as a pivot in his play Amadeus: the character Antonio Salieri notices how Mozart composed it while haunted by memories of his imposing, recently deceased father Leopold, and uses that insight to psychologically wound Mozart. One detail from the opera's first production quietly persisted into everyday European life: Leporello's 'Catalogue Aria,' in which he lists Don Giovanni's conquests including 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1,003 in Spain, gave the word 'Leporello' to several Germanic languages as a name for folded pamphlets, photo albums, and continuous stationery.

• 6. What Other Composers Heard

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  Franz Liszt produced what is probably the most musically substantial independent response to Don Giovanni: a large operatic fantasy called Réminiscences de Don Juan. The minuet from the first act finale attracted particular attention. Moritz Moszkowski transcribed it; it appears in the manuscript of Liszt's own Fantasy on Themes from Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni; and Sigismond Thalberg combined it with the serenade 'Deh, vieni alla finestra' in his Grand Fantaisie sur la serenade et le Minuet de Don Juan, Op. 42. Chopin wrote Variations on 'La ci darem la mano,' the seduction duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina, for piano and orchestra. Beethoven and Danzi also wrote variations on the same duet, and Beethoven returned to the opera's opening bars in variation 22 of his Diabelli Variations, quoting Leporello's complaint 'Notte e giorno faticar.' Muzio Clementi wrote piano variations on Zerlina's aria 'Batti, batti.' Michael Nyman built his 1981 piece In Re Don Giovanni from a 15-bar phrase in the accompaniment to the Catalogue Aria. The connection between Tchaikovsky and this opera carries its own strange biographical weight. In 1855, Mozart's original manuscript was purchased in London by the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, who kept it in a shrine in her Paris home. Tchaikovsky visited her there in June 1886 and described the experience of looking at the manuscript as being 'in the presence of divinity.' Viardot was also the teacher of Désirée Artôt, a singer who had once been Tchaikovsky's unofficial fiancée; Viardot may have persuaded her not to marry the composer. The baritone who sang the title role at the opera's Prague centenary performance in 1887 was Mariano Padilla y Ramos, the man Artôt had married instead.