Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 5 Don Giovanni

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 29 to reply that rape was not viewed in such a negative light in Mozart’s time, we should remember that even the not-very- moral Leporello protests, “But Donna Anna didn’t ask to be raped.” Nor is the Don’s music (as opposed to the opera’s) at all innovative or romantic. It is either banal, if pleasing (the serenade) or manic (the so-called “Champagne Aria,” lasting a mere 90 seconds), or borrows a spurious tenderness in the service of violence to come (“Là ci darem la mano” – in which, as Kerman noted in a 1990 essay, all the real musical invention is supplied by Zerlina). We have only to compare this “hero” with genuine romantic heroes, such as the Werther of Goethe and Massenet, in order to see that he’s not that sort of thing at all: no boundless inner world, no surging love, no subjectivity at all, musical or verbal. I fear that these romantic male critics have been duped by the evident power of Mozart’s music into locating this “demonic” power in the person of the Don, where it surely does not reside. Perhaps the idea of boundless sexual energy without love or tenderness has appeal for men of a certain age – but that doesn’t license projecting those sentiments onto Mozart, who associated music of enormous power and gravity with the critique of the Don and his actions. So far as our first enigma is concerned, then, the opera gives a clear answer: the Don is a horrible and empty person, whose passing we should not lament, and who surely is not (as Bernard Williams oddly wrote) the source of the vitality of all the other characters. Mozart never glorified male abuse and silencing of women, and in some ways he was a man more of our current era than of his own. Da Ponte was different, and perhaps some of his Donnish sensibility creeps at times into the libretto he wrote for Mozart – here Kerman is insightful. Nonetheless, even the libretto clearly condemns the Don’s behavior, so there is little if any tension between libretto and music. Our second enigma is far more difficult, since the desire for revenge motivates all the other characters of the opera much of the time, and it surely gives the plot its structure. Here Kerman’s idea fully convinces: the libretto requires revenge, but Mozart evidently has a hard time subscribing wholeheartedly to the cruel punishment of anyone – a reason why the final ensemble has always been felt unconvincing and flat, and has sometimes been cut in performance, including by Gustav Mahler (although this practice is seldom encountered today). Does Mozart, then, find any way to extricate himself from the trap set for him by Da Ponte’s libretto? The trap of making revenge look fitting and mercy inappropriate? Searching for an alternative and more typically Mozartean emotional statement, one might first try turning to Don Ottavio, who surely does express sentiments of sympathy and altruism that are highly Mozartean, and closely linked to Mozart’s rejections of revenge in other operas – least, in his beautiful aria in Act One, “Dalla sua pace.” But this aria was added for the Vienna performance at the request of a singer who had trouble with the florid runs of the Act Two aria, “Il mio tesoro” (which was cut on that occasion), so it can’t have been an original part of Mozart’s conception. And in any case, Don Ottavio, though sensitive and in many ways appealing, is a thoroughly conventional figure, and throughout the opera he pursues revenge as much as anyone else. The answer, then, must be found by turning to the opera’s trio of remarkable women, surely the prime sources of its extraordinary vitality and musical glory. Though required by the plot to approve of the punishment of the Don, each of them has a moment in which she turns away from the morality of revenge to embrace a richer conception of love. For Zerlina, access to tenderness is easy, since, as a young peasant woman, she has no outsize attachment to honor (for Mozart always a trap) to stand in her way. In the sensuous and tender “Vedrai carino,” she says that sexual love can heal the wounds created Many Mozart devotees make a pilgrimage to Prague’s Estates Theater, where Don Giovanni premiered in 1787 and is still performed today. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, painted posthumously in 1819 by Austrian artist Barbara Krafft. Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.