Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Don Giovanni
A concert performance of Mozart’s ever-green masterpiece is a doubly welcome event. First, because the music is so rich, so vivid, so graphic, that the drama stages itself in the mind’s eye of the listener. We can concentrate on the orchestra (no longer buried in the pit) as well as on the singers – and in no opera is the orchestra a more active participant in the action: an extra personage, at every moment abetting, questioning, deepening.
Second, because, with an opera notoriously difficult to stage well, a concert performance frees us from the distracting and distorting ideas commonly imposed on it by theatre producers baffled by its strange mixture of genres and by the enigmatic character and fascination/repulsiveness of its protagonist. Don Giovanni habitually brings out the worst in opera directors. How often do we see a production that does justice to its unique dual nature?
By the time Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto, in the spring of 1787, the myth of Don Juan the godless libertine and enemy of society who suffers divine retribution had sunk to the level of crude pantomime – a horror story that, to sophisticated taste, was fit only for the fairground. The contemporary one-act opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, on which da Ponte based his text, is almost unrelievedly comic in style and tone. But Mozart had other intentions.
His Don Giovanni may be a comedy – comedy was Mozart’s natural environment (the opera ends with the surviving characters addressing the audience with the traditional moral, “This the fate of all evil-doers”). But it is always comedy with a difference. So he sees no reason why it should not include elements of tragedy as well as of the broadest humour, nor why an opera buffa should not have room for the supernatural.
The Stone Guest – the marble statue who nods his head and speaks and comes to supper – is as real to Mozart as the terrified servant who cowers under the table while his master fearlessly faces the divine visitant. In Mozart’s treatment of the scene there is no trace of the scepticism typical of the 18th century. He takes the myth absolutely seriously.
Mozart establishes his position at the outset, in the spine-chilling D-minor chord that launches the work and in the ominous throb of the rhythm and the wailing woodwind scales that follow. But he feels perfectly free to mix these genuinely frightening sounds and gestures with the material of pure farce.
Critics have objected to the burlesque scenes of the first half of Act 2, with their swapping of cloaks and hats, mistaken identities and all the other trappings of comic opera: Leporello dressing in his master’s clothes and deceiving the gullible Donna Elvira; Don Giovanni, disguised as his servant, beating up the peasant Masetto; Leporello, taken for Don Giovanni, coming within an ace of being killed. But such juxtapositions of terror and buffoonery are central to the whole work.
The pattern is laid down from the start. The tense, vehement overture (no trace here of the buffo manner of the overture to Figaro) leads straight into Leporello’s grumbling, boastful patter as he stands guard outside while his master attempts to ravish Donna Anna – patter which continues to undercut the fierce exchange between Anna and the masked Don; then the duel and the death of the Commendatore, followed by Leporello’s “Who’s dead – you or the old man?”, and then the discovery of the body and the oath of vengeance sworn by Anna and Ottavio – music that is no laughing matter, written in the death-haunted D minor that is one of the defining colours of the score.
At the same time Mozart, who loved jokes and leg-pulls, responds just as enthusiastically to the scope the story offers for laughter. In the finale, shortly before the arrival of the Stone Guest, the comedy descends to comic-strip level, as Leporello greedily covets his master’s supper: Leporello: “What huge mouthfuls – I’m almost fainting with hunger”. Giovanni: “Watching my mouthfuls, he’s almost fainting with hunger”. A moment later Elvira bursts in, begging him to repent before it’s too late. And, even as we laugh, our hair stands on end.
Perhaps no composer but Mozart could have achieved this fusion of such seemingly antithetical elements. In his hands they are of one substance (not least in the sinister, comic-tragic sextet - Leporello at Bay, dressed as his master - a movement that stands out even in an opera as abundant and momentous as this). We are so caught up in it, swept along by the prodigious momentum of the music, that there is no time to question it. It is what it is.
Don Giovanni sustains this ambiguity to the end. The visit of the Stone Guest and the damnation of the Don, and the awesome music they inspire, are followed, Shakespeareanly, by an epilogue in which life returns to normal. Or does it? They duly sing the moral: “The death of the wicked fits the life they led.” But the music’s writhing chromaticisms make it clear that they are still in thrall to the monster whom they believe divine retribution has rid them of. His fiery fingerprints are all over the final minutes of the opera. Their lives will never be the same again.
All the characters, and not only Don Giovanni, are like creatures in the grip of an overmastering obsession. And Mozart, never judging them, sympathising and identifying with them all, the Don included, lives their joys and griefs, their crimes and follies, to the full, in this most eventful and unclassifiable of all operas.
© David Cairns
