By James Conlon
Donna folle! indarno gridi, Chi son io, tu non saprai!
(Crazed woman! In vain you scream! Who I am, you will not know!)
—Don Giovanni (Act I, opening scene)
To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.
—Deuteronomy 32:35
The story of Don Juan has been around at least since the early 17th century, and his legend has grown to the point that each century has had its say on the subject. Our own, not yet barely passed two decades, is still busy with it. Like the chameleon its eponymous antagonist is, it has been wrapped in many different philosophical and literary garments.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte conferred on the subject a seriousness and universality that has insured its permanence in our culture. This article purports to do very little but to bear witness to that phenomenon. Like The Marriage of Figaro, its predecessor in the Mozart–da Ponte trilogy, its plot is located at the nexus of sexual and class politics. It portrays burning social issues that our contemporary society is grappling with: the victimization through sexual abuse of women, and the suppression of the rights of the unprivileged at the hands of a more powerful social class.
Donna Anna swears vengeance upon Don Giovanni after discovering the death of her father, the Commendatore, by his hand after his attempt to seduce her. Rachel Willis-Sørensen made her 2019 Lyric Opera of Chicago debut in the role and returns as Donna Anna at Ravinia on August 11 and 13. (photo: Kyle Flubacker)
But of the many implications of this extremely complex narrative, there is an overwhelming presence that, at the beginning and the end, orients the listener. And it is accomplished without a word of text, nor preamble, nor explanation. The terrifying power of the key of D minor, in the hands of the transcendent genius of Mozart, tells us that this is a cautionary tale, illustrating the fate of those who transgress without repentance. The composer, so generous in his own clemency, pardons almost every character in his operas, but here has made a stunning and powerful exception. In an era when portrayal of death on the stage was relatively rare and unfashionable, Mozart presents us the protagonist’s damnation in full view.
Alexandre Évariste Fragonard’s drawing Don Juan and the Commander’s Statue (Last Scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni), c.1825–30 (photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Mozart dared the unthinkable: to render the rigorous application of religious law in the theater. He depicts the terror of eternal punishment in such an arresting manner that his association of death with the key D minor reigned well into the 20th century. Few composers have scaled those heights. Mozart’s model seems unsurpassable.
Mozart’s moral position concerning the protagonist is clear, and despite much of the literary musing of subsequent centuries, remains unmistakable. The moral decay, the cruelty, and the malignant antisocial narcissism of the man we know as Don Giovanni merited a powerful and definitive punishment. The music alone is unmistakable in delivering that castigation. The final scene is awe-inspiring, such that neither believer nor nonbeliever can remain indifferent to its terrors.
The story seems to have originated with a play attributed to the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina, entitled El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest). Don Juan, as it came to be known, would have many new settings—by certain counts, over 1,700 in the centuries following its creation—many in France in the 17th century and most notably by Molière. Da Ponte knew and borrowed from an operatic version called Don Juan Tenorio—referred to as a dramma giocoso (jocular or playful drama), the curious appellation retained by Mozart and Da Ponte. Was it a drama or comedy? By the end of the 18th century, the subject of Don Juan seemed to be exhausting itself when Mozart and Da Ponte alighted on it. Had it not been for them, the story might have disappeared altogether. But they produced a work of transcendent genius, transformed the story of Don Juan and, whether intentionally or not, gave birth to Don Giovanni, a modern myth.
The “new” Don Giovanni captured the imagination of some of the greatest writers of the next two centuries. The list is long, but its most prominent exponents were Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Søren Kierkegaard at first, to be followed later by Charles Baudelaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Albert Camus. And when they wrote about Don Giovanni, they wrote not about Don Juan Burlador, but as the world had come to know him through Mozart and Da Ponte.
Don Giovanni confronts the animated statue of the Commendatore in the opera’s final scene. Lucas Meachem starred as Don Giovanni at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2019 and reprises the title character at Ravinia. (photo: Kyle Flubacker)
This cautionary tale of evil punished, and the infinite complexity, richness, and ambiguity of the human soul, inspired each age to see it through its particular lens. As the 19th century gradually lost interest in sin and salvation and reshaped itself, it saw him as a reflection of its own yearnings and search for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust had his quest, it was said, and Don Giovanni his conquest. He was for some an “antihero” who drove himself to self-destruction through his insatiable drives and dragged others along with him. Another point of view was that the Don was a melancholy protagonist of a self-defined drama, in search of some illusionary antisocial grail of his own making. In each case, the 19th century often contradicted itself but found a use for this story to say something about its own preoccupations. It saw a mirrored image of itself.
In the 20th century he was to undergo a radically different evaluation under the microscope of psychoanalysis. The earlier portrait of a flawed but defiant hero of Romanticism, in all of the ambiguity that image suggests, gave way to a psychopathic criminal. His malignant narcissism exhibited every form of neurosis and pathology imaginable.
And so on. Each age—including our own, here at Ravinia on August 11 and 13—sees in him and his story a reflection of its own world view. He now rightfully no longer represents anything good: he is a criminal predator, serial seducer, and rapist. He is an abuser of women and all society, a paradigm of patriarchal privilege. Today we must differentiate between the character of Don Giovanni and the eponymous opera. Mozart and Da Ponte tell a fascinating tale. One searches in vain to find evidence of any sign of Mozart’s sympathy for him. To the contrary, the work countenances neither his essence nor his behavior.
Although Mozart’s framework resides in the supernatural and the rendering of divine justice, the abundant freedom with which he and Da Ponte create this theatrical drama has less to do with religious dogma than the infinite variety of the human experience. Don Giovanni and the Commendatore provide the pillars that hold up the edifice that houses all of the other characters. Neither is fully human nor a pure incarnation of abstract principles. They have a human life but are simultaneously symbols, manifestations of powerful forces, polar antagonists. That the latter is, if not the arbiter, at least the messenger of a divine judge.
But who is the real Don Giovanni? Even the birth of his story is mysterious. Kierkegaard defined him as a theoretical construction. In this view, Don Juan never existed, nor in reality can he. Taken literally, his story seems improbable, if not ludicrous. The sheer number of names in Leporello’s catalog of the Don’s conquests removes it from the world of the real to the realm of fantasy and hyperbole. The exaggerated dimensions of his crimes invite theorizing, polemics, and commentary. His raison d’être is one dimensional: to subvert society through the abuse of women and the profligate exercise of his assumed aristocratic birthrights. To try to explain why he does so is, in a way, fruitless: he simply does so.
“Motiveless malignity,” Coleridge’s famous description of Iago’s character, leaves the “why” unanswered, and is a potent challenge to the possible futility of questioning what drives the Don. We meet him and the Commendatore on their last day.
Meachem as Don Giovanni at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2019
The personal history of the Commendatore is unknown. He does not have a name, just a title. His dramatic function is to deliver a divine message, and when it is rejected, to inform the Don that his time has come. All we know about Don Giovanni is the depth and breadth of his misdeeds, but nothing at all about his person, who he is, nor how he came to be what he is. They fulfill their dramatic function in this fundamentally otherworldly drama of defiance and retribution. Divine justice is meted out.
It has often been pointed out that Don Giovanni has no core to his personality. There is no “there” there. Mozart purposely deprives him of a self-revelatory or confessional aria. Unlike Verdi’s Iago, who explains himself in his credo, the Don never reveals anything. His three solo numbers are one-dimensional snapshots (not complete arias) of what propels him: wine (the drinking song), pursuit of deception and seduction (the serenade), and violence (as he prepares to beat Masetto).
All the other characters are fully human. Tomes are written, rightly, discussing the three women. These fascinatingly diverse characters, Anna (the aristocrat), Elvira (the emerging middle class), and Zerlina (the peasant), are bound together. Theirs is a shared misfortune: in crossing paths with this malevolent narcissist, their erotic impulses are challenged, violated, awakened, magnified, or changed. One assumes that the lives of all of the 2,065 women inscribed in Leporello’s catalog (whose list includes Donna Elvira if not Donna Anna and Zerlina) have been similarly impacted. Each principal woman develops in the course of events, and each is allotted arias in both acts to chart that growth. None is left unscarred by having been in the orbit, however briefly, of this destructive roving planet. At the end of the opera, Leporello the servant will seek another employer, and Masetto the peasant will attempt to eke out a living off the land. Don Ottavio of the landed aristocracy will try to go forward with Donna Anna, although Don Giovanni has struck closer to home for both of them. Mozart does not prognosticate their future. Donna Elvira, who for me is the most evolved human being of the entire story, will retire, at least for the moment, into a convent. Whether everyone’s lives are temporarily or irrevocably changed is a question that is left unanswered.
Hubris and supernatural justice catch up with Don Giovanni as the specter of the Commendatore drags the impertinent and impenitent Don to his rightful place in eternal damnation.
Together they all try, and fail, to retaliate against the Don. Retribution is the province of the divine. “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,” we are told in the scriptures, and so it is for our “antihero.” Greeks of antiquity were punished by the gods for hubris and defiance. The sin of Adam, though variously interpreted, is essentially that of disobedience. On the day portrayed in the opera, the Don, who has seemingly gotten away with riding herd on society through his legion sexual misdeeds, has become a murderer, and there, it seems, a line has been crossed.
Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been and will be seen as all things to all people: monstrous sexual predator, amoral iconoclast, devil, intellectual pioneer, free agent of anarchy and nihilism, self-styled defender of Rationalism, mentally deranged psychopath. The list could be endless. Through Mozart’s masterpiece, he has traveled the world through the centuries from the burlesque libertine of the original to, for better or worse, a fixture in our culture. Who he is, is unknowable, and what he represents, a matter of perpetual disagreement. He has always given us the slip, and always will. He himself told us so while escaping from Donna Anna in his opening line of the opera, uttering words as prophetic as they are emblematic:
Chi son io, tu non saprai
Who I am, you will not know!
© James Conlon, revised 2022