Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 5 Don Giovanni

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 Rape, revenge, love: the Don Giovanni puzzle By Martha C. Nussbaum ability to inspire love in a woman – such as tenderness, humor, playfulness, an inner life? Susanna (in Figaro ) says of Cherubino, “If women love him, they surely have good reason.” Could anyone say this with a straight face about the Don? Rather, we should say, “If women love him, they’re bewitched by wealth, class, and false promises.” He certainly lacks the appealing playfulness of the Don in Tirso de Molina’s The Prankster of Seville ( El Burlador de Sevilla , 1630), probably the first literary example of the Don Juan legend. He doesn’t have ideas either, as Molière’s Don Juan, another of Da Ponte’s sources, conspicuously does. Taking these characteristics away, Da Ponte leaves only hollowness in their place. Mozart further emphasizes the Don’s hollowness by refusing him a full-scale aria, in which inner thoughts and feelings could be explored. He’s little more than a series of elegant poses: a “No-Man” (as musicologist Wye Jamison Allanbrook [1943-2010] puts it in her subtle and important study of Don Giovanni and Figaro ). And lest we try Donna Elvira (Ana María Martínez) is unnerved when Don Giovanni (Mariusz Kwiecien) reappears in her life: Don Giovanni at Lyric, 2014 | 15 season. ´ Todd Rosenberg Don Giovanni is a glorious enigma. Its music is so enthralling, and yet its sentiments are confusing, perhaps also confused. Is the listener to be captivated by the Don, and to feel a sense of loss when he leaves the world – as many romantic interpreters have believed? If so, there is one sort of problem: for this Don is a really horrible person, who, despite a certain boyish energy and charm, has no sympathy at all for anyone else and who uses a combination of class dazzle and sheer force to make his conquests. If audiences of a bygone era (or, at any rate, their male members) viewed this behavior indulgently, surely audiences today cannot. Mozart typically portrays this sort of domineering masculinity in a very negative light (think of the Count in The Marriage of Figaro ); he prefers men who approach women with gentle and tender sentiments (even when, like the lovers in Così fan tutte , their emotions aren’t going to last very long). Or is the Don a scoundrel for whose punishment we should be rooting all the time, as librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s subtitle, “The Profligate Punished” ( Il dissoluto punito ) suggests? If so, there is another sort of problem: Mozart is virtually obsessed with the repudiation of a morality based upon revenge. Again and again, in Idomeneo , The Marriage of Figaro , The Magic Flute , and, most obviously, La clemenza di Tito , mercy and gentleness win out over vindictiveness and hate – not just in the libretti, but also, and more powerfully, in the music. Where, then, in this opera, is the Mozart whose gentle humanity we love? It’s tempting to agree with the great opera critic Joseph Kerman (1924-2014): Da Ponte gave Mozart a libretto that was in some ways a bad fit for the composer’s own emotional preoccupations, and Mozart did the best he could. Before we conclude that Kerman is right, however (and I think he is at least partly right), we need to consider the romantic interpretation, since it is so influential. According to a long line of (male) critics, beginning at least with the 19th- century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813|1855), and including my own teacher, the distinguished British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929|2003), the Don is an emblem of erotic striving and sexual energy, a kind of life force whose doom leaves the world gray and impoverished. Such interpreters hear in the opening D minor of Don Giovanni ’s overture the heralding of a new post-baroque and post-religious era (never mind that this same music is later associated with the very conventional, religious Commendatore). They go on to represent the Don as eros incarnate. But can this be correct, when the Don needs force so often to achieve his ends (even with Zerlina, initially interested though she is)? And when he so conspicuously lacks characteristics that Mozart elsewhere associates with the