Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Salzburg prodigy paraded through the courts of Europe from the age of six, who broke with his archbishop at twenty-five to live as a freelance in Vienna, wrote some six hundred works, and died at thirty-five in debt, with the Requiem unfinished. Don Giovanni of 1787, to Da Ponte’s libretto, follows the seducer through a day and a night to the supper where the statue of the man he killed drags him to hell, and is the opera that Kierkegaard, Shaw and every philosopher of desire has argued about. St. John’s reads the libretto with the score in junior year.