Don Giovanni

Overview

Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts, about three hours in performance, with music by Mozart and a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was first given in Prague in October 1787, where Mozart’s Figaro had been a triumph the year before, and revised for Vienna the following spring.

The two of them called it a dramma giocoso, which was a standard label for a comic opera with serious characters mixed in, and the label has never quite fitted. The opera begins with an attempted rape and a killing and ends with a man dragged into hell, and it contains a servant’s comic catalogue aria, a peasant wedding and a scene of three characters singing simultaneously in different metres at a ball. Nobody has satisfactorily described its tone, which is why it has attracted more philosophical commentary than any other opera.

Reading the libretto is not the same as hearing the work, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What the text gives you is the structure, the arguments and the jokes; what it cannot give is the moment in the supper scene when the orchestra plays the opening of the overture again and the temperature of the room changes. Read the libretto with a recording.

Da Ponte’s source material was a Spanish play by Tirso de Molina from around 1630 and a string of adaptations since, including Moliere’s. The statue that comes to dinner was already traditional.

What happens

Act I. Leporello, keeping watch outside a house at night, complains about his job. His master rushes out masked, pursued by Donna Anna, who is trying to identify him. Her father, the Commendatore, appears, forces a duel, and is killed. Giovanni and Leporello escape.

What exactly happened inside the house is the opera’s first ambiguity. Anna later tells her fiancé Don Ottavio a detailed account of a man entering her room and of her resistance, and readers and directors have disagreed for two centuries about whether the account is complete.

Donna Elvira arrives from Burgos, looking for the man who promised to marry her and left after three days. Giovanni sets Leporello on her, and the servant delivers the catalogue: a list, by country, of his master’s conquests, ending with the figure for Spain, one thousand and three. The aria is funny, and its cruelty is the point; Elvira is standing there while it is sung.

Then a peasant wedding. Giovanni separates the bride, Zerlina, from her betrothed Masetto and takes her toward his villa, and the duet in which he does it is the most beautiful music in the opera and is a seduction of a woman on her wedding day. Elvira interrupts.

The act ends at a ball in Giovanni’s house, with three separate dance orchestras on stage playing a minuet, a contredanse and a German dance simultaneously in different time signatures, which is the most technically extraordinary thing Mozart wrote for the theatre. Giovanni drags Zerlina off, she screams, he tries to blame Leporello, and nobody believes him. Three masked figures unmask and denounce him, and he escapes again.

Act II. Disguises and farce. Giovanni swaps cloaks with Leporello so that the servant can lead Elvira away while the master serenades her maid. Masetto comes hunting him with a band of peasants and is beaten by Giovanni wearing Leporello’s clothes. Leporello, in his master’s cloak, is cornered and unmasks himself in a panic.

Then the graveyard. Fleeing over a wall at night, Giovanni and Leporello find themselves among monuments, and a voice tells him his laughter will end before morning. The statue of the Commendatore has an inscription promising vengeance. Giovanni, amused, orders Leporello to invite it to supper. The statue nods.

The supper. Giovanni is eating, with a small band playing tunes from popular operas, including, as a joke, one of Mozart’s own from Figaro. Elvira bursts in, having given up her anger, and begs him to change his life. He refuses, and mocks her, and toasts wine and women. She leaves, and screams outside.

The statue arrives. The music that accompanies it is the slow, terrible D minor of the overture’s opening, which has not been heard since the first minute of the evening. It refuses food, says that one who has eaten heavenly food needs no mortal fare, and demands that Giovanni repent. Three times.

Three times he refuses, and the refusals get shorter. Flames, a chorus of voices, and he is taken down.

The epilogue. The others arrive to find him gone. Anna asks Ottavio to wait a year. Elvira will enter a convent. Zerlina and Masetto will go to dinner. Leporello will find a better master. And they line up and sing a brisk moral: such is the end of those who do evil, and the death of the wicked is always equal to their life.

That final sextet was cut from many nineteenth-century productions and from Mahler’s, on the grounds that it broke the spell. It is now almost always restored, and the question of what it does to the ending is a live one.

How to read it

Do not read it alone. Get a recording, follow the libretto, and let the two run together. Any of the standard recordings will do.

Read Act I scene 1 twice and then Anna’s narration in scene 13, and consider whether they are consistent. The opera is built so that they need not be.

Notice what the music does with Giovanni. He has no aria of self-revelation, nothing like the soliloquies Mozart gives his other leading characters. He borrows everyone else’s style instead, singing a peasant duet to Zerlina and a serenade under a window, which is either the sign of a man with no interior or the most sophisticated character portrait in opera.

Read Kierkegaard’s essay in Either/Or if the argument interests you. His claim is that Giovanni is not a character with psychology at all but the principle of sensuous immediacy, which cannot be represented in words and can only exist in music, and that this opera is therefore unrepeatable.

Then notice how much the libretto supports a much harsher reading. The first event is an assault, the catalogue is recited to a woman it humiliates, and the seduction everyone finds charming happens to a bride.

And decide about the final sextet. Restoring it makes the opera a comedy with a terrifying penultimate scene; cutting it makes the damnation the last word. Both have been standard practice and each produces a different work.

Questions it raises

• What happened in Donna Anna’s room? The opera declines to say and her own account is the only evidence.
• Giovanni is given three chances to repent and refuses. Is that courage, stupidity, or the only consistent act in the opera?
• He has no aria of self-examination. Does that make him a void, or the one character who does not need to explain himself?
• Elvira gives up her revenge and tries to save him. Is that love, humiliation, or the opera’s only act of grace?
• The seduction duet is exquisite and is being sung to a woman on her wedding day. What does it mean that the music is on his side?
• Does the closing sextet restore order, trivialise the damnation, or expose how quickly everyone moves on?