Monday Musicale with the Maestro – September 7, 2020 – Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has thrilled audiences since its debut in Prague (29 October 1787). And for the last fifty years, it has consistently made the international Top Ten list of operas most often performed. To call it “the greatest opera ever written” (as Rossini and Tchaikovsky have) may require explanation, but certainly not disbelief or ridicule. Tchaikovsky writes that hearing it for the first time at the age of sixteen greatly affected his life. “The music of Don Giovanni,” he notes,

The libretto is by Lorenzo da Ponte, who had provided the words for Mozart’s previous “hit,” The Marriage of Figaro (a comedy). But Don Giovanni is instead a dramma giocosa—a work poised between drama and comedy, tragedy and slapstick. This sharply contrasting dichotomy is something Shakespeare had used to great effect to broaden the emotional range of his tragedies. Think of the character of the Fool in King Lear or the grave-diggers’ scene in Hamlet. In Don Giovanni we find dichotomy and ambiguity everywhere—including the portrait of the Don himself. And it is this element of complexity, beautifully conveyed by Mozart’s own masterful musical contrasts, that has haunted his audiences for centuries.

Mozart’s title character, perhaps the first operatic “anti-hero,” is based on the fictional Don Juan of Spanish writer Tirso de Molina (though the legendary Casanova did drop by the dress rehearsals before the premiere to give his advice!).  Don Giovanni is a nobleman and a libertine—a selfish, out-of-control womanizer. But he is also a winning and irresistible charmer, and the young bride he dares to seduce (Zerlina) is quite willing.

Though Don Giovanni murders a man only ten minutes into the opera, we’re led to wonder, Was it self-defense? The answer is never made clear. And though the Don’s downfall is already foreshadowed in the opera’s full title: Il Dissoluto punito, ossia Il Don Giovanni (The Libertine Punished, or Don Giovanni), his end manages to be truly shocking. Before the hammer falls, the Don’s appalling sins have been explored most thoroughly through a comedic lens—most notably the recounting of his crafty and long-suffering manservant, Leporello.

In his aria “Madamina” (Dear Lady), Leporello shocks one of the Don’s spurned lovers (and amuses us) by reading to her a list of his master’s sexual conquests. This aria is often called the “Catalogue Aria.” And it IS quite a list of women whom the Don has seduced and then abandoned: 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Spain, and 1003 in Spain! Obviously, Don Juan is not a discriminate seducer, and as Leporello says, the Don especially likes “la piccina,” the young beginners.

The aria is light-spirited, and the moment is played for comedy. But eventually, in the dark and terrifying final scene, the Don is dragged to Hell by demons because he will not repent and change his ways. The music for this horrifying scene is Mozart at his most harmonically audacious. The shrill and eerie sounds he conjures up to portray infernal spirits and subterranean sounds still has the power to startle contemporary audiences. At my first orchestral rehearsal for this scene with the North Carolina Symphony, the concertmaster questioned a certain chord, saying; “Surely there is a mistake here! Isn’t there a wrong note in my part?”

I love that in Moliere’s play Don Juan (taken from the same source as Don Giovanni), Leporello looks into the fierly hell-hole where the Don has disappeared and cries out, ” My wages! My wages!”

Singing “Madamina” with the Durham Symphony in today’s video is bass-baritone Luke Boehm. Luke is a native of Fayetteville and has won several awards, including one from the UNC-Chapel Hill Performers Competition. Luke sings beautifully, and with his acting skills he deftly brings out the “message” of this aria.

William Henry Curry
Music Director
Durham Symphony Orchestra

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