Textual Polyphony in Mozart's Don Giovanni

TEXTUAL POLYPHONY IN MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Lesley Grace Sullivan

______Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Director

Graduate Program in Romance Languages and Literatures Notre Dame, Indiana April 2016

Lesley Grace Sullivan

TEXTUAL POLYPHONY IN MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI Abstract by

Lesley Sullivan

The usual reading of Don Giovanni (DG), aside from political critique of aristocracy, sees it as an opera moralizing on the punishment of sin. The resulting interpretation descends from a literary tradition originating in counter-

Reformation texts, starting with de Molina’s El Burlador and continuing with such acclaimed comedies as the commedia-dell’arte L’ateista fulminato, to Goldoni’s and Moliere’s Dons. Charles Russell presents Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s DG as “a culmination of a 150-year-old tradition … of all Don Juans who had come before”

(Don Juan Legend, XXX). This linear reading informs the widely shared interpretation that over the whole opera, from overture to finale, looms the sinner’s refusal to repent and inevitable condemnation to eternal punishment. I propose a different method that takes into account widely divergent but interlocking contemporary texts. I define this approach as polyphonic and contrapuntal: expanding the network of literary and non-literary texts from

Mozart’s Kyrie in C minor to Da Ponte’s memoirs. My interpretation is that, from the overture onward, Mozart evokes the final call to repentance rather than damnation. Don Giovanni dramatizes the offer of forgiveness, not its refusal. For my father, Lawrence E. Sullivan, who continues to show me that everything has great value.

ii CONTENTS

OVERTURE “Viva la Libertà!”: The Release of Don Giovanni………...... 1 ACT I The Don Juan Myth……………………………………………………………………………………………….6

INTERMISSION Deconstructing Dichotomy: The Sinner and the Libertine…………………….18 ACT II Mozart’s Opera: Staging Sacred Secular Drama………………………………..……………….33 FINALE………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….41 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..43

iii OVERTURE

“VIVA LA LIBERTÀ”: THE RELEASE OF DON GIOVANNI

The Counter-Reformation legend of Don Juan has lived through great playwrights such as Goldoni and Molière, commedia dell’arte troupes, and puppet theater—each version a different treatment of the legend, telling more about the authors, producers, and audiences than the Don himself. Its most profound and influential theatrical rendition is the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo

Da Ponte.

A prevailing reading of Mozart’s Don Giovanni focuses on its political critique of aristocracy. This is due partly to the nature of the genre at the time, rooted in the tradition of opera buffa1, which more than opera seria expressed contemporary social relations and class tensions.2 James Webster rightly praises Andrew Steptoe’s The

Mozart-Da Ponte Operas for his focus of his interpretation on the social-cultural milieu

1 Mary Kathleen Hunter and James Webster, Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) provides contributions on the genre of opera buffa in Vienna during Mozart’s years of composition.

2 John Platoff illustrates in Mozart’s ability to both embrace and challenge conventions such as opera buffa and opera seria to make dramatic points; by rejecting or transforming these conventional musical procedures Mozart created a more effective and realistic musical setting. He writes that an awareness of conventional procedures enables us to recognize both the conventional and the unconventional in Mozart’s operatic music. John Platoff, “How Original Was Mozart? Evidence from Opera Buffa”, in Early Music, 105-117. For

of Don Giovanni, resulting in a “refreshing change from the usual art-for-art’s sake approach to a genre which was…covertly (if not indeed overtly) political”. 3 The political reading of Don Giovanni is also a response to the plot and language of the libretto. The

Don uses his nobility and charm to seduce thousands of women4, mainly by promising them marriage—and therefore elevated status and security. Though in Mozart’s Le

Nozze di Figaro (1786) the plot is driven in part by the Count’s desire to implement the droit de segneur—his ‘noble right’ to bed the bride of any marriage in his domain—Don

Giovanni is not class-conscious:

Non si picca se sia ricca, He doesn't care if she’s rich se sia brutta, se sia bella: if she's ugly, if she's pretty; purché porti la gonnella as long as she’s wearing a skirt, voi sapete quel che fa. you know what he does.5

All this abuse of power on the part of the Don—the consent of the women being just as significant—is done in the name of “Libertà.”6 The power of this word at this time in history has fixed Mozart’s opera, too, in the shadow of revolution and class struggle.

Don Giovanni premiered in 1787, during the writing of the Constitution of the United

3 James Webster, “Mozart’s operas and the myth of musical unity” in Essays on Opera, 1750- 1800 ed. John Rice (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 63.

4 According to Don Giovanni’s comic servant, Leporello, the audience is informed in Act I, scene v along with Donna Elvira, that Don Giovanni has had thousands of conquests. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Il Don Giovanni, ed. Giovanni Gronda (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 24.

In Italia seicento e quaranta; In Italy six hundred and forty; In Almagna duecento e trentuna; In Germany two hundred and thirty-one; Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna; One hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one; Ma in Ispagna son gia' mille e tre. But in Spain there are already a thousand and three.

5 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Il Don Giovanni, ed. Giovanni Gronda (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), Act I, scene v. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

6 Da Ponte, Il Don Giovanni, Act I Finale: “È aperto a tutti quanti./ Viva la libertà!”

States and the eve of the French Revolution.7 Furthermore, the particular socio-cultural circumstances of Austria under Enlightened Emperor Joseph II—under whom Vienna became the most tolerant and unified center of Enlightenment thought and policy during Mozart’s ten years there—further defines the reading of Don Giovanni in a social and political light. Steptoe’s work takes a necessary turn, but lays bare an important contradiction in Don Giovanni scholarship: the enthusiasm for a political interpretation of Don Giovanni’s libertinism does not align with Steptoe’s characterization of Mozart’s

Prague nor Viennese audiences,8 to which Mozart and Da Ponte catered. Pierpaolo

Polzonetti taking a closer look to socio-political influences on Mozart and Da Ponte’s works, focusing on the American Revolution as a more direct influence, concludes in his work Italian Opera is the Age of the American Revolution: “Mozart’s scholarship can benefit…by accepting the reality that ideas of Mozart’s time were more influential on his art than ideas before or after his time.”9 In response to the call to take into account widely divergent but interlocking contemporary texts and contexts made by the work of

Polzonetti and James Webster,10 this thesis will expand the network of literary and non-

7 Pierpaolo Polzonetti begins to trace in his book Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) a narrative about Mozart’s interest in the ideas of Revolutionary America. This work continues in a very convincing forthcoming chapter “Mozart and the American Revolution” where he contests the idea that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a harbinger of the French Revolution and points rather to the American Revolution as a more direct point of reference.

8 Steptoe illustrates the significant differences between the opera’s audience in Prague—“the majority drawn from a provincial public with unsophisticated tastes...these musically appreciative, but intellectually unpretentious, listeners”—and the “sophisticated public” in Vienna, 117.

9 Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 330.

10 In his article “Mozart’s operas and the myth of musical unity”, Webster calls for a new and fruitful analytical paradigms, most notably what he terms “multivalence”, which holds that the various domains of an opera (text, action, music, etc.; as well as within the music, tonality, motives,

literary texts as a re-examination of another common traditional reading of Mozart’s

Don Giovanni: that it is an opera moralizing on the punishment of sin. The research presented unveils this traditional reading as an interpretive bias that has gone, for the most part, unnoticed and has kept hidden most intriguing considerations of Mozart and

Da Ponte’s great work, whose resulting interpretations yield very different conclusions about the entire opera’s message.

This thesis will discuss the historical, biographical, and musical contexts which first uncover and then re-evaluate a prevailing ‘enlightened’ stereotype of sin and divine justice, which is seen in Don Giovanni scholarship as an unenlightened residue of the

Baroque Counter-Reformation. The Don Juan myth will be the focus of the first section.

The next section will consider historical and biographical contexts surrounding the opera, with particular attention to the Catholic Enlightenment, a movement in which

Mozart participated both publicly and privately, and to the implications of Mozart’s particular Catholicism for understanding his opera. The final section will turn to music, where we hear Mozart’s truest voice. The striking similarities of the Overture of Don

Giovanni to Mozart’s later Mass music give great insight into Mozart’s own personal understanding of divine love—neither the oppressive judgement of the Counter-

Reformation nor an Enlightened anti-clerical secularism, but an eternal invitation of merciful redemption and communion.

instrumentation, etc.) are not necessarily congruent and may even be compatible; and that the resulting complexity or lack of integration is often a primary source of their aesthetic effect”, 198.

This thesis is not an attempt to “claim” Mozart for Catholicism. The aim of this thesis is to better understand, and more honestly represent, a man who has moved me and countless others. I hope my Catholic cultural background can constructively help to fulfill this aim in ways that can fruitfully contribute to scholarly debate and widen the scope by which we interpret Mozart’s Don Giovanni, how we understand Mozart’s life, and the part of history in which he lived.

ACT I

THE DON JUAN MYTH

The use of “myth” to refer to the Don Juan story introduces well the interpretive skew that has characterized some of the most important works of Don

Giovanni scholarship outlined in this section. Referencing Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-

Strauss, the great twentieth-century scholars of myth, Angelica Forti-Lewis begins her work Maschere, Libretti e Libertini: Il mito di Don Giovanni nel teatro europeo wondering about the nature of this story whose origin and author are specific and well-known, yet presents an archetypal figure who transcends his time and place of origin, attracting audiences from the Counter-Reformation through the Enlightenment and the Romantic

Era to today, periods often characterized as violently opposed to each other. Angelica

Forti-Lewis recognizes and explores this inescapable presence of a historical origin and traceable path of the story, fundamental to the main questions of her work: who is Don

Giovanni and how should we study and speak about him.

“Se noi accettiamo la ormai comune definizione di mito illustrate da Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, o le varie categorie classificate da Lévi-Strauss, secondo i quali il mito è un prodotto archetipico attribuito coralmente a civiltà preistoriche, le cui origini si perdono in un passato arcaico, chiaramente il termine mito non può venir adottato per Don Giovanni, il quale, nato in piena era storica, anzi agli inizi di quella che noi consideriamo l’età moderna, ci appare inizialmente come creazione

teatrale di un ben noto, particolare autore secentesco, Gabriel Téllez, detto Tirso de Molina.”11 Forti-Lewis adopts the term “mito letterario” and concludes

…[I]l mito letterario, si snoda come un filo conduttore che si arricchisce lung oil cammino dei secoli, nutrendosi del patrimonio artistico e filosofico delle varie civiltà, mantenendo e restituendo, nonostante le innumerevoli trasmutazioni, delle costanti fondamentali della natura umana.12 The linear reading of the Don Juan story through its many textual representations has resulted in readings of later works—representations composed in periods of time historically presented as opposed to each other (Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment,

Romantic)—in the light, or shadow, of its Baroque Counter-Reformation origins.

An understanding of the works which gave birth to the Mozart’s Don Giovanni— who is all versions and no version—is necessary for understanding the legendary character which has attracted audiences, artists, and some of the greatest minds of scholarly disciplines, from psychological to theological, anthropological to philosophical that reaches its greatest expression in Mozart’s opera. This method results in an interpretation of Don Giovanni in scholarly literature as a distillation of all past Don

Juans of a literary tradition originating in counter-Reformation texts, starting with de

Molina’s El Burlador and continuing with such acclaimed comedies as the commedia-

11 Angelica Forti-Lewis, Maschere, Libretti, e Libertini: Il Mito di Don Giovanni nel Teatro Europeo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 13. “If we accept the popular definition of myth illustrated by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, or the various categories delineated by Lévi-Strauss, according to whom the myth is a archetypic character attributed to prehistoric societies, whose origins are lost in an archaic history, clearly the term myth cannot be adopted for Don Giovanni, who was fully conceived in an historic era, moreover at the beginning of one that we consider the modern age, that seems to be the theatrical creation of a specific well-known seventeenth-century author, Gabriel Tellez, called Tirso de Molina.”

12 Angelica Forti-Lewis, Maschere, Libretti e Libertini: Il Mito di Don Giovanni nel Teatro Europeo (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992), 15.

dell’arte L’ateista fulminato, Goldoni’s Don Giovanni Tenorio and Moliere’s Dom Juan.

This linear reading, tracing influence from text to text, informs the widely shared interpretation that over the whole opera looms the sinner’s refusal to repent and his just condemnation to eternal punishment. The scholarly works considered here are some of the most significant of Don Giovanni scholarship. Each presents the history of the myth as necessary for a true understanding of the originality of Mozart.

Charles Russell is one of the most influential scholars on the literary tradition of this legend. He gives a comprehensive account of the history of the myth in his work The

Don Juan Legend Before Mozart. As the title suggests, he follows the legend across genres and borders, tracing the conquests of Don Giovanni until he arrives to seduce

Mozart’s audiences in 1787. Russell divides his book in two—the first section tracks Don

Juan through nonmusical and musical theater before Mozart, while the second section is dedicated to the presentation of a collection of all the eighteenth-century Don Juan opera librettos that preceded Mozart’s, a most valuable collection. Russell’s intention is clear: to present Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni as “a culmination of a 150-year- old tradition…of all Don Juans who had come before.”13 The work traces the historical progress of the plot, characters, and meaning to reveal that “all early versions echo forward toward [Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s].”14 As he hoped, the work is a useful tool for scholars of the legend, however, tracing the myth as a linear reading stemming from the

13 Charles Russell, The Don Juan Legend Before Mozart. With a Collection of Eighteenth-Century Opera Librettos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), xii.

14 Ibid.

Counter-Reformation leaves distinct traces of interpretation of the opera. Russell concludes:

Da Ponte recognizes that the consequence of pushing onward, pushing to extremes, requires the inevitable death of his hero, a death that he accepts as right and just and the meaning of which he does not attempt to ignore or hide. He concludes his story with jubilation, with a celebration of the triumph of justice over wickedness: he and his onstage players have been witness to the proper and fitting end of an evildoer, of a dissolute who had upset the harmony of their lives, and they rejoice.15 This recognition that Don Giovanni “had to be punished, publicly and unequivocally”, which Russell presents as Da Ponte’s ability to grasp the deep significances of the opera, is one typical of the Counter-Reformation, not of the

Enlightenment. Such residual interpretations as the result of filtering the myth through its Baroque origins represent the way of most Don Giovanni scholarship.

The very last paragraph before the collection of eighteenth-century librettos, however, suggests a new direction for interpretation. In an interesting turn toward

Mozart’s music, Russell suggests that Mozart’s own judgement of the character is rather different than that which he attributed to Da Ponte:

As for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the quiet man whose soul, like Dante’s or Shakespeare’s, embraced all men and whose own small, confined life must have seen in the figure of Don Juan an image of freedom, an image of freedom of the imagination, he may not have been quite so certain that Don Giovanni had to be condemned; by Da Ponte in his libretto perhaps, but not by Mozart in his music… The harsher and more insistent the statue’s demands for repentance and justice, the more glorious the music that Mozart prepared; the closer Don Juan approached the fire, the

15 Russell, The Don Juan Legend Before, 126.

more Mozart’s music raised him up; the more wicked the man, the more heavenly the music.16 Whether the characterization of Mozart is convincing or not, the turn to Mozart’s music opens the door to a more enlightened interpretation of the opera, one that did not delight most in Don Giovanni’s necessary punishment, but rather in the depth of its human narrative.

Though Russell’s explicit intention was to map the history of the myth, the scholarly tradition of Don Giovanni has followed the same path. This is partly a consequence of dealing with a myth that took root just a few centuries behind ours, which was introduced above through the work of Forti-Lewis. Her concern is not strictly terminological, but methodological, and it is well-founded. In a thorough account of past and new trends in Don Giovanni studies, there is need for a method of study that traces both the chronological literary history and the thematic history of ideas through the

“forest of various interpretations.”17 She suggest a methodological dichotomy, a convergence of synchronic and diachronic studies. Listing her chapter titles already gives a sense of this method: “Don Giovanni…ancora?”; “Beffe e banchetti”; “La prima fusione letteraria del mito: El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra di Tirso de Molina”; “Da

Firenze a Parigi”; “Dom Juan; Parola o musica? Don Giovanni illuminato da Goldoni e

Mozart”; “La redenzione di Don Giovanni”; “Il filosofo; L’eroe assurdo dell’età dell’ansia”; “Don Giovanni femminista.” It is the chapter “Parola o musica…” that is of

16 Ibid., 127.

17 Ibid., 18. “selva delle varie interpretazioni”

most interest here and a closer look reveals the great success of Forti-Lewis’ method.

Forti-Lewis moves between character analyses, biographies and letters of Mozart and

Da Ponte, Kierkegaard’s reflections, contemporary idea on death, libretto text, music, and elements that transcend the stage, each informing the next. Though her method suggests brilliant new ways to look at the opera, Forti-Lewis’ focus remains the myth and for her it is the opera that feeds the study of the myth, and a new interpretation of the opera itself is yet to be done.

Angelica Forti-Lewis as well as others such as James Webster recognize the work of Julian Rushton’s Don Giovanni: A Cambridge Opera Handbook as breaking new ground for Don Giovanni scholarship. James Webster’s description of Rushton’s methods amusingly sounds a lot like Don Giovanni’s approach to women18: “he assumes no single principle, appeals to no formal types. Instead he points, according to the context, to dramatic parallels, tonal sequences, ‘sensitive’ sonorities and whatever else seems appropriate”19.

Julian Rushton’s Cambridge Opera Handbook to Don Giovanni includes an essay by Edward Forman on” Don Juan before Da Ponte”, praised for its superb analysis of the various earlier Don Juan stories and Da Ponte’s relation to them.20 The essay focuses on

18 In his famous catalogue aria at the beginning of Act I, Leporello tells us of Don Giovanni’s preference for women: “Non si picca – se sia ricca,/ Se sia brutta, se sia bella;/ Purché porti la gonnella,/ Voi sapete quel che fa.”

19 James Webster, “Mozart’s operas and the myth of musical unity,” in Essays on Opera, 1750- 1800, ed. John A. Rice (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 71.

20 Ibid., 60-82.

what Da Ponte borrows from previous sources and, most significantly, where he digresses. A closer look to one specific digression from his sources, which Forman references, simultaneously reveals an important innovation on the part of Da Ponte and also the shadow of damnation and punishment that continues to be imposed by scholars, including Forman.

The encounter with the stone guest is the beating heart of the story. Variations of setting and phrasing of this encounter, more than any other part of the plot, reveal as much about the character of each particular Don Juan, as it does about those who have produced it. Forman focuses on the differences between the encounter in the texts of de Molina, Molière, Bertati—Da Ponte’s main source— and Da Ponte. Tirso’s Don Juan repeats his famous motto, “Tan largo me lo fiáis!”21; the time for repentance will come, but it is not now. When he meets the stone guests and realizes this time has come, he asks for the chance to confess, but the statue refuses: “This is God’s justice: as you behave, so you must pay”. Molière and Bertati both retain the idea of postponing repentance in a joking manner, Bertati translating Molière’s joke word for word.22

Forman notes that it must have been a conscious decision, then, on the part of Da

Ponte, who borrowed so much from these sources, to omit the reference to Tirso de

21 Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convidado de Piedra ed. Gwynne Edwards (Warminster: Aris&Phillips, 1986), 43.

22 Presented in English translation in Forman’s chapter, Molière writes (and Bertati will copy directly):

Juan: Sganarelle, we out to be thinking of reform, all the same./ Sganarelle: You don’t say!/ Juan: Yes, indeed we must reform. Another twenty or thirty years of this life, then we’ll take thought for ourselves. 43.

Molina’s weighty message. This is a very important observation by Forman and requires the follow-up question as to why Da Ponte did this. Forman’s conclusion of Da Ponte’s motivations, however, follow the common characterization of Da Ponte as a crowd- pleaser who wants to focus on Giovanni’s spectacular punishment: “It would be rash to deduce from this that the licentious abbé wished to convince himself or anyone else that it was never too late to obtain absolution…”23 This common characterization of Da

Ponte has kept the curtain closed on the possibility of Da Ponte’s participation in a new focus in Don Giovanni of both composer and librettist.

The common characterization of Da Ponte as a silly person, not to be taken too seriously, has contributed to the scholarly attention on punishment rather than consider another intentional motive for Da Ponte’s omission noted above: a focus on the offer of repentance and forgiveness to a sinner. Forman concludes that Da Ponte’s exclusion of the idea of a later repentance “indicates his desire…to concentrate on the spectacular side of Giovanni’s punishment, rather than on its implications for his own life, or his spectators’”.24 This sort of conclusion must be reevaluated by way of more serious consideration of Da Ponte. Though often dismissed for the self-aggrandizing tone and heroic illustration of himself, Da Ponte writes that his Memorie were written with the hope that a wise reader may learn something useful not only from his successes, but explicitly from his failure:

23 Edward Forman, “Don Juan before Da Ponte” in Cambridge Opera Handbook: Don Giovanni (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 43.

24 Ibid., 44.

Indeed, if, in my own youth, I had read the story of a man who had had the same experiences that I was to have, and whose conduct had been more or less the same as mine was, how many, many errors might I not have avoided, the consequences of which cost me so many tears at the time are still bitterly afflicting the years of my decrepitude! Now I, too, can say, indeed must say, with Petrarch: ‘I know my error and excuse it not.’ But the harm, at my age, is beyond remedy; nothing else is left me but repentance. May others at least learn from my example what I did not have the opportunity to learn from the experience of others.25

This piece from Da Ponte’s memoirs was a brief address to the author found in the middle of a reflection on Don Giovanni, whose womanizing would have struck close to home for this priest whose memoirs are full of affairs with young women.

Forman’s consideration of Da Ponte seems counter even to his own perceptive consideration of Da Ponte’s innovations. Rushton and Forman both recognize the depth of character that Da Ponte adds to each role, as well as his most successful invention the

Act 1 finale: Don Giovanni’s enemies all gather in one place--the feast to which he has invited them without reserve—to join forces against him. This scene is unlike any of the previous sources and allows for the “unification of plot”, a device that would not have appealed to a Baroque audience. The Baroque audience was content to follow Don

Juan’s escapades across space and time—days and nights spent in various towns, or various countries—intrigued by el burlador and his unavoidable punishment. Da Ponte’s innovations—depth of character and the characters uniting against Don Giovanni—are, counter to Forman’s characterization of Da Ponte, a sign of a new focus. The condemnation of Don Giovanni by the characters is based on his abuse of the laws of

25 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memorie, trans. Elizabeth Abbot (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 455.

civil society make them representatives of the audience. In Da Ponte’s text, these characters are given voices of human judgement—revengeful, pitiful, resentful, merciful. In the end, human denunciation is not enough, but their condemnations have some power to move him—“È confusa la mia testa/ non so piú quel ch’io mi faccia/ e un’orribile tempesta/ minacciando, oddio, mi va.”26 These examples of Da Ponte’s additions to the Don Juan legend suggest that “his desire…to concentrate on the spectacular side of Giovanni’s punishment” and “its implications for his own life, or his spectators’” are not mutually exclusive. The text also requires a reconsideration in the light of Da Ponte’s own life and writings, often dismissed as silly for their attempts to self-characterize as a hero.

An honest practice of biography offers an excellent model for the necessary reinterpretation of Don Giovanni in the light of the biases presented above. With biography, there is a dedication to first understanding a given life in dialogue with their socio-cultural context, rather than placing them within a historical narrative.

Biographers such as Piero Melograni attempt to give a sense of the polytextuality of

Mozart’s life.

Presenting Mozart’s exposure to influences of all types—philosophical, theological, musical, literary, spiritual, personal, etc.—provides the necessary context and beginning for a truly polytextual understanding of Mozart’s music. Melograni’s work

26 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni, ed. Giovanna Gronda (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 44.

provides the necessary contextualization without heavy-handed conclusions about

Mozart’s character, which can be satisfying, though limiting, as in the case of Milos

Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus. Melograni says of Don Giovanni:

…He had remained faithful to one of his basic principles: to represent the ambiguities and the follies of life and the strength and the weaknesses of human relations. The drama that he brought to life on the stage fully expressed the ambivalence of everyone’s realities, precisely because it was merry—giocoso. Only by uniting pain with irony, mixing the serious and the ridiculous, and breaking out of preordained schemes could he conquer the public and leave his mark.27 The biographies of Melograni and Solomon give a sense of the “mixing” that was a part of Mozart’s life and work, often working on more than one, usually more than two, types of composition, simultaneously. Mozart scholarship has not hesitated to compare works across genres, though comparisons are mostly of his operatic music to his instrumental music. As far as I can tell, there is a striking lack of literature on Don

Giovanni in light of Mozart’s sacred music. There is no scarcity of commentary on the sacred or the supernatural, which makes the lack of comparison with his sacred music more striking. The scholarly works mentioned above treat filter Don Giovanni through the origins, which leaves some trace of interpretation. The Baroque origins of the myth have created a prevailing ‘enlightened’ stereotype of sin in Don Giovanni scholarship of an unenlightened residue of the Counter-Reformation, where sin calls forth the inevitable punishment of divine justice. It would seem that punishment of the sinner by the figure of divine justice as one element that does not change in each representation

27 Piero Melograni, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 208.

of the story. However, it the idea of “sinner” and “justice” is vastly different in Tirso de

Molina’s Counter-Reformation Spain and the Hapsburg Empire of Joseph II, the heart of

Catholic Europe during the Enlightenment.

INTERMISSION.

DECONSTRUCTING DICHOTOMY: THE SINNER AND THE LIBERTINE

Mozart’s Don Giovanni shows the continuity of three eras in one opera—

Baroque-Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism—historically presented as negations of each other. However, it seems that there is still a tension between the Age of Reason and the mystical, “unreasonable” trends—the obsession with the fantastic and the supernatural, the retrieval of the Middle Ages such as Da

Ponte’s proclaimed turn to Dante’s Commedia for inspiration for Don Giovanni, and the popular fascination with the terribile—for which Mozart was composing28. It is that tension that could be seen as firing the sparkle of the Romantic era, in which Don

Giovanni continued to be performed and the Don Juan story was taken up as an antihero of Romanticism. These trends are present in Mozart’s final operas, and especially his Don Giovanni.

These tensions are popularly explained in two ways: either as a break from his father’s blind obedience to the Church or the result of Masonic, anti-clerical activity.

28 Supernatural trends in eighteenth-century theater, most often associated with Masonry, goes beyond a Masonic interest to suggest Masonry as a consequence of the same currents that were feeding supernatural trends in popular theater. In David Buch, Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), Buch unveils the popular fascination with marvelous, supernatural, and terrifying topics in the eighteenth-century.

These explanation have not taken into full account Mozart’s personal relationship with the Church or the Enlightenment. This makes the overlapping of this Don Juan tradition particularly interesting: the clash of what historically has been presented as opposites—

Baroque and Enlightenment—makes fertile ground for the seeds of Romanticism.

This first recorded version by de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convidado de

Piedra, was printed in 1630 but probably prepared sometime around 1616,29 just as The

Thirty Years’ War was beginning. This conflict was a series of wars, begun and sustained in the name of religious uniformity, but ended up widening gaps and divisions as one of the most destructive conflicts of European history, eventually involving the great powers of Europe. The city of Prague, which hosted the 1787 premier of Don Giovanni, marks the occasion that began the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. In 1618, the Catholic

Hapsburgs sent to respond to a call by the Protestant Lords to determine whether they were responsible for the order of the cessation of Protestant churches. Two regents were released, but two claimed responsibility, expecting arrest. Instead, the regents, as well as their secretary, were defenestrated, literally tossed from the window of the Old

Prague Castle; all three survived the 70-foot fall.30 Almost one hundred and seventy years later, though still under careful control of the Hapsburgs, Prague had become a center of the arts, known in particular for its rich musical scene, and welcomed Mozart’s

Don Giovanni, il dissoluto punito. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ended the Thirty

29 For a further discussion of the play and its dates, see Gwyne Edwards, ed. El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convidado de Piedra, Tirso de Molina (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986)

30 This is more accurately known as the Second Defenestration of Prague, as there were more than three other defenestrations of Prague. The first occurred in 1419 and the last case closed in 2006.

Years War and institutionalized religious toleration for Lutherans, Reformed/Calvinist

Christians, and Catholics, from which the most elaborate discussion of toleration developed in Central Europe.31 By this time, Don Juan was already thirty years old.

Don Juan was born during the period of the Counter Reformation. As David

Kimbell observed, “in an age of rigid dogmatism what could be more delightful than abandoning oneself to the pleasures of unreason; and in an age of hierarchical absolutism what could occasion a more delicious thrill than the overthrow of a taboo?”32 Tirso’s play was a mixing of these extremes of the time—both the thrill of the stuff of the improvised commedia dell’arte and the moral absolutism of the times. It is not just the presence of both themes, but the fulfillment of both of these extremes, that lies at the root of the pleasure of the Don Juan legend. The audience indulges in the trickery of el burlador, delighting in his escapades throughout the entirety of the play, while also establishing their position as moralists through the witness of his just death.

De Molina’s Don Juan is first and foremost a trickster, a youth whose motto is “Que largo me lo fiàis!”33, who seeks the thrill of the trick over the seduction of women, while the stone guest, though necessary, remains secondary to his adventures.

Mozart arrived in Vienna in March of 1781 for the coronation of Joseph II as sole ruler of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands. Mozart would live in Vienna

31 Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)

32 David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 282.

33 Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convidado de Piedra ed. Gwynne Edwards (Warminster: Aris&Phillips, 1986), 23.

until his death ten years later in December of 1791. Under Joseph’s reign, Vienna immediately became one of the most tolerant, open, and liberal cities in Europe. G. R.

Cragg called Joseph “the most ardent of the enlightened despots.”34 He launched a series of reasoned reforms against the feudal nobility and the Church in Rome. Joseph’s mother Empress Maria Theresa had made moves in this direction—restricting torture and fostering intellectual life and state responsibility of education—though she was firmly intolerant of Jews and Protestants, including forced conversions and relocation of

Jews and Protestants, and conceded only slightly toward the end of her reign due to

Joseph’s threats of resignation.35 Joseph saw his mother’s intolerance as “unjust, impious, impossible, harmful and ridiculous.”36 These tensions account at least in part for the reactionary zeal of his sole rule. When Joseph became sole ruler in 1780 and, free from the opposition of his mother, he immediately began the implementation of his radical reforms leading to, what Cragg calls, the Austrian Enlightenment’s “militant phase.” By October of 1781, Joseph issued his Toleranzpatent, or Patent of Tolerance.

Joseph’s reforms reached all areas of life, reflecting the optimism of this time. He established a form of absolute government in which uniform rule and practices would be founded on the principles of reason.37 He mandated compulsory education,

34 G. R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason (Bristol: Penguin, 1960), 219.

35 Ibid., 220.

36 Derek Beales quoting Joseph II in Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa 1741-1780, v1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 14.

37 Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 212.

magnified the importance of ‘practical subjects’ of law and science, and lightened taxation of the peasantry. Joseph’s Patent of Tolerance in 1781 granted, for the first time, the rights of citizenship to those who did not observe the official faith: “they were allowed to practice law or medicine, they might engage in trade and become members of corporate bodies, they could proceed to academic degrees, and by special dispensation they might be admitted to public office.”38 This is not the Hapsburg of de

Molina’s Spain. These ten years of Joseph’s reign 1780-1790 coincide with Mozart’s time in Vienna.

The breadth of Joseph’s zealous reforms and speed of their implementation created instability. The rapid disassembling of traditional institutions of social structure and led to an economic and social individualism that threatened to undermine the authority and security of the state itself, and toward the end of his reign, Joseph began attempts to regain control. 39 “It was the late eighteenth-century Habsburg Empire, in which Mozart lived and worked during his maturity, that most clearly and painfully embodied the contradictions underlying the Enlightenment’s espousal of the opposing prerogatives of economic freedom and social cohesion.”40

38 Ibid., 222.

39 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 6.

40 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 5.

Most recent studies on the Enlightenment in Catholic countries, most notably that of Ulrich Lehner and Jeffrey Burson,41 have just begun to see that a false dichotomy has arisen in critical reception of the Enlightenment between the Enlightenment and religion, and more specifically, the Church.42 The notion of a Catholic Enlightenment was anathema to many Enlightenment thinkers, but this has become the accepted understanding of the Enlightenment overall. It is tempting to see a contradiction in

Mozart, too, between the religious aspect and the enlightened aspect—in the discord between himself and his father; his decision to leave his patron the Archbishop

Colloredo, a decision which was left exclusively to the patron, at the suggestion of new patrons, two wealthy Viennese women; his extravagant lifestyle in Vienna; his commitment to Freemasonry. It is unfair, however, to take the historical category of

“The Enlightenment” as one block, which scholars such as Nicholas Till and Andrew

Steptoe have started to point out. Scholars have begun to challenge the reception of the

Enlightenment, which presents the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy, equality and toleration and religious authority of a Church. The long-overlooked thread of Enlightened Catholicism engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. A deconstruction of this false dichotomy exposes Mozart as one of those who made room for both Catholicism and

Enlightenment.

41 Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010)

42 Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich H. Lehner, ed.s Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014)

Contributors to recent scholarship are working to show that Catholicism and

Enlightenment, faith and reason, progress and religion were not incompatible.43 Thomas

Wallnig’s work on the current status of studies of eighteenth-century Austria and the

Habsburg monarchy reveal the separation of the two as a consequence of modern insistence of the separation of the two.44 On the contrary, some of the most cherished values of modernity can be traced to pre-Enlightenment Catholic reform. The Council of

Trent two hundred years earlier, as well as codifying what Catholic believed in contrast to Protestants, addressed what had to be reformed in the church, stressing that human freedom is a crucial feature of theology. It became a foundation of the Enlightenment belief in individual freedom and the natural capacities of the human person. The trend toward practicality in Catholicism is evident in the new definition of sainthood after

Trent, where the heroic virtues of the candidate were more important than miracles performed; this idea of Catholic heroism stressed that everyone was called to holiness.

Catholic Enlighteners used the newest achievements of science and philosophy to explain in new terms Catholic dogma and to reconcile Catholicism with modern culture—the Benedictine university of Salzburg in Austria, for example, was the first

43 A push toward new writings on the Habsburg monarchy is thanks in part to the work of Wolfgang Schmale through the University of Vienna and the Austrian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, editor of Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert und Österreich. Internationale Beihefte, an international series published between 2010-2013.

44 Thomas Wallnig, “Approaches to the "Aufklärung" in Austrian Historiography after 1945” in 18th Century Studies in Austria (1945-2010): The Eighteenth Century and the Habsburg Monarchy, International Series, Vol. 4 ed.s Johanne Frimmel, Werner Telesko, and Thomas Wallnig (Vienna: Winkler Publishers, 2011)

European institution of higher learning to introduce the discipline of experimental physics; this is the Salzburg in which Mozart was raised.

With the Catholic Enlightenment movement in Europe receiving some long- overdue attention, some scholars such as Nicholas Till have begun to take seriously

Mozart’s participation in it. Unlike other Enlightened thinkers in his circle, who had publications or other documents of explicit participation, Mozart’s involvement is gathered from various areas of his biography--letters, people in his circle, his Masonic involvement, and most importantly, his music. A brief look now to figures of influence for Mozart, as a child and an adult.

A major figure of the Catholic Enlightenment was Ludovico Muratori. Mozart was raised on Muratorian beliefs, notions of which shine through his letters throughout his life. Muratori was given asylum in Vienna in the 1740s after being condemned by the

Catholic Church in Rome for his works on the devotional practices of Catholics. A

Muratorian circle arose in Salzburg as a result of Muratori’s friendship with the

Archbishops of Salzburg, who fostered progressive enlightened ideals and were responsible for making Salzburg the most liberal state in Catholic Germany. 45 Mozart’s enlightened education as a child in Salzburg resulted from this Muratorian bend of the

Archbishops’ of Salzburg, patrons of the Mozart family, embodied, most importantly, in

Leopold Mozart, Mozart’s father. Where Leopold and the Archbishops’ ideas clung to an unenlightened Catholicism, Wolfgang broke with them.

45 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 13.

The discord between Wolfgang and his father, as well as his patron the

Archbishop of Salzburg, are signs of a significant break between generations and religious practice, the break from an intolerant and authoritative oppression characteristic of counter-Reformation religious practice and the possibility of an

Enlightened Catholicism. With a famous kick in the butt from the archbishop’s steward,

Mozart settled in Vienna, the center of Catholic Enlightened Europe, in 1781 where he stayed for the last 10 years of his life.

Leopold was man of the Enlightenment in his thinking and reading. In light of his intolerance and rigidity mentioned above, Leopold himself embodied a tension between intolerant and oppressive expectations of obedience and enlightened ideals of toleration and freedom. This is no surprise when we consider Leopold own position as servant of a clerical court, dependent on the Archbishop for livelihood, meanwhile a practicing Catholic. He expected the same strict devotion of his children. He praised the works of enlightened thinkers such as Muratori who portrayed the “bourgeois vision of a well-regulated life steering a balanced path between the extremes of stoic self-denial or conformist obedience, and excessive license, pursuing ‘the search for an ideal of humanity combining morality and sensuous enjoyment.’”46 Muratori writes in his

Science of Rational Devotion: “Cioè, che Dio nulla ci comanda, a nulla ci siamo noi obbligati verso di Lui, che non sia il proprio nostro Bene; e tale, che anche senza essere ordinate da i divini Comandamenti, ci dovrebbe eseguire da noi, purchè diciam

46 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 11.

daddovero di amare e cercare la nostra Felicità, anche nella vita presente”.47 This practical, rational Catholicism of Muratori was implemented by Leopold with a severity from which Mozart desired, and eventually was able, to separate himself.

Maynard Solomon gives great importance in his biography of Wolfgang to

Leopold’s education, as he was Wolfgang’s primary educator, as well as Leopold’s biography. Solomon gives the impression that there were many things that embittered

Leopold before Mozart’s birth. He was forced to leave his university for poor attendance, did not seek a career in the church, did not provide for his widowed mother and siblings after his father died, did not receive permission from his mother to marry nor the dowry she had conferred upon his siblings, about which he wrote, “she can go to Hell today or tomorrow.”48 Leopold’s biography is also peppered with stories of his disregard for church officials and clergy as well as borderline heretical actions on his part, including slandering two prominent citizens of the Salzburg cathedral, for which he was publicly ridiculed.49 Though Solomon sometime over-speculates, his characterization of Leopold is very convincing: compounding his constitutional dissatisfaction and mistrust was a sense—pervasive, yet nonspecific—of having been

47 Ludovico Muratori, De regolata devotione de' cristiani, (Venice: Albrizzi, 1747), 7. “God commands us nothing, and we are not bound to anything with respect to him, which is not after all really and substantially for our own good, even although he had not commanded it; we should put it in practice as rational creatures, and as setting a proper value on our own true and real happiness even in the present life.” Transl. Alexander Kenny (Dublin: Byrn, 1789), 8.

48 Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 26.

49 Solomon, Mozart: A Life, 29.

deeply wronged, which in turn required that he find some means to restore his status and to pay back his persecutors.

Leopold’s relationship with the Church was complex. Intended for the priesthood as a child, his family lived in a house owned by the Jesuit order and attended the Jesuit gymnasium. As an adult, his family’s well-being depended on the Archbishop’s patronage, though he constantly felt that he and his son were not justly compensated or appreciated. Leopold was not satisfied with a musical career, though he seems to have found his true calling in raising, educating, and promoting his children, who were to be subjected to their father’s dissatisfaction and sensitivity to being wronged as well as used to seek revenge on these two natures.50 Leopold Mozart went to Mass and confession and regularly received communion, urging his family to do the same.

Wolfgang followed the same practices regularly until his death, as well as other signs of personal devotion, though the discord between Wolfgang and the Archbishop and then later with his father as well, are signs of a significant break between generations, the break from an intolerance and authoritative oppression of the counter-Reformation and the possibility of an Enlightened Catholicism.

Don Giovanni is very commonly read in the light of Leopold’s death which occurred as Mozart was beginning his composition. This is due to the intimately

50 In a letter of 29 December 1777, Leopold writes that Mozart “will certainly do his utmost to win glory, honor, and money in order to help us and to save his father from the scornful mockery and sneers of certain persons, whose names I dare not mention, but whose ridicule would, as you know, most certainly send me to my grave. Wolfgang’s good fortune and success will be our sweetest revenge.” (as cited in Solomon, Mozart: A Life, 33)

complicated relationship between Mozart and his father, Leopold. For over twenty years, Leopold had lived for his son, and it is clear from letters that Mozart’s

‘abandonment’ for Vienna increased the chastisement and guilt-trips that Leopold was already wont to inflict on Mozart. Mozart saw his father only two times after leaving for

Vienna and when Leopold died, as Mozart was began composing Don Giovanni, he did not go to Vienna, nor did he visit when he learned from his sister that his father was very ill. Surely this occurrence had great effect on Mozart and likely the opera as well, but it has certainly furthered the themes of guilt and judgement as the central theme of discussion surrounding Mozart’s opera. This is not only evident in historical narrative interpretation of Mozart’s life, such as Milos Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus, but also biography and other scholarship on Mozart.

Mozart became a Mason in 1784. At that time, the lodge “Zur wahren Eintracht” was the most significant lodge for the Viennese Enlightenment, but Mozart joined another, lesser lodge “Zur Wohltätigkeit”, which identified itself as the place for those who believed in a Catholic Enlightenment. As the title suggests—“Beneficence”—the lodge served as a center for the reformist Muratorian Catholicism promoted by Joseph himself. For this circle, Catholicism was Enlightenment. The understandings of what

Catholicism meant certainly differed among the members. Johann Pezzl for example, fellow member of the Zur Wohltätigkeit lodge, was on the outside left on the map of the

Catholic Enlightenment. His writings approach the boundaries of the Catholic

Enlightenment; his polemics against monasticism resembled those of Protestant polemics, questioning in his most radical text the divinity of Christ, and some of his

writings implying a deism close to that of Voltaire. Publicly, though, Pezzl remained a

Catholic. A copy of Pezzl’s novel Faustin, or The Philosophical Century, was found in

Mozart’s library at his death; it concludes “Under Joseph’s government, we have the universal victory of reason and humanity, and an enlightened, tolerant, truly philosophical century!”

It was undoubtedly for its promotion of a Catholic Enlightenment that Mozart joined this lodge. This does not mean that Mozart aligned himself exactly with figures such as Pezzl; the positions toward Catholicism were so varied among those of the

Catholic Enlightenment movement, that it would be impossible to say one could align with them all as it was not unified. However, Mozart did dedicate himself to the ideal of salvation through charitable acts, that religious piety was better expressed through deeds—an inscription by Mozart in his wife’s prayer book read “Do not be too devout”.

Mozart’s letters, too, are full of “little homilies” to kindness and the importance of the heart. But for Mozart, generosity was not a substitute for religion, but an expression of it. Letters tell us, too, of his conventional devotion—attending daily Mass, saying the rosary in thanks for something—commingled with everyday, profane activities—just a look at some of his letters between his family to get a taste also of a profane language— the Mozart’s had potty mouths.

Deconstructing the dichotomy that has arisen in post-Enlightenment scholarship allows for an expansion of our understanding of Enlightenment and Mozart as a representative. The dichotomy can be illustrated with two representative figures: the sinner and the libertine, which Don Giovanni himself embodies. Mozart’s break with his

father, his Masonic participation, his personal devotion suggest that Mozart was neither willing to accept his father’s oppressive insistence on an unhappy obedience nor was he willing to abandon his identity as an observant Catholic—an identity that was being stretch and tested at the time.

Though Mozart joined the Muratorian lodge, it is clear that Mozart did not align himself with all aspects of Muratorian enlightened understanding of Catholicism. There is great evidence that Mozart did not agree with the severe limit of festive masses that

Salzburg implemented, and the reduction of music in the Mass in Vienna, after all, Mass music was Mozart’s favorite form of composition.51 Mozart undertook a number of liturgical compositions on his own after he had left Salzburg—his Great Mass in C minor

(K. 427) and the Kyrie in D minor (K. 342/368a)—whose unparalleled magnificence are in stark contrast to the new restrictions. It is these works, then, where Mozart pushes against the restrictions of the practices in which he continues to participate—catholic and enlightened. They offer great insight into Mozart’s understanding of both in relation to each other. Mozart neither fully accepts nor rejects the character of the sinner, called to act according to a divine ordinance, nor the total freedom of the libertine. In 1787, on the eve of the premier, Mozart composed the Overture for his Don Giovanni, the sinner and libertine. The striking opening music of this dramma giocoso recalls neither

Mozart’s comic nor serious opera overtures. Its composition, instead, is the music of the

51 Mozartbriefe February 28, 1778, trans. Lady Wallace (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007; 1888), 53. “The orchestra is said to be good and numerous, so my favorite style of composition can be well given there—I mean choruses, and I am very glad to hear that the French place so much value on this class of music.”

Catholic Mass he was composing on his own accord—more specifically, the music of an awesome Kyrie in minor.

ACT II. MOZART’S OPERA: STAGING SACRED SECULAR DRAMA

Mozart was highly conscious of presenting in Don Giovanni an accepted Catholic paradigm of divine love—the ever-merciful invitation to communion—rather than a prevailing ‘enlightened’ stereotype in Don Giovanni scholarship of sin, which is seen in

Don Giovanni scholarship as an unenlightened residue of the Baroque Counter-

Reformation.

These Kyrie, written after he left Salzburg, composed on his own not for commission, were much larger in scale than the official liturgical policies of Joseph II or

Colloredo allowed for. Mozart’s Mass in C minor was cast on a nearly unprecedented scale. In its utter rejection of contemporary liturgical expectations, and in its prominent juxtaposition of contrapuntal learning and virtuoso display, the mass occupies a provocative position when set against Joseph II’s ideal of church music, announced in his

Gottesdiensordnung during the composition of this Mass. David Ian Black, among others, has suggested that Mozart’s Mass was a response to the Emperor’s restrictions on Mass music.52 Mozart alludes in a letter that the Mass was written in thanksgiving for his wife’s recovery from illness, a sign of personal devotion, as well, perhaps, of his love for Constanze; Constanze did, indeed, perform the Soprano 1 role in its only recorded

52 David Ian Black, Mozart and the Practice of Sacred Music, 1781-1791 (PhD dissertation, Harvard, 2007),

performance in Salzburg. Both reasonings suggest a decided break with the ‘prescribed’

Catholicism of Salzburg and Vienna with a decided commitment to the great music of the Mass. The Kyrie in D minor is also uncharacteristic of sacred music in Vienna during

Mozart’s time. The lavish orchestration was unprecedented in Mozart’s sacred music, particularly the inclusion of clarinets and horns, and more typical of an opera orchestration. Away from his father, Mozart was able to practice his religion more freely.

Due to the small output of sacred music during the last ten years of Mozart’s life, it is Mozart’s operas of this period, rather than his Masses, that are recognized as the truest measure of Mozart’s Christian beliefs and profoundly religious temperament.

There he is able to give voice to his understanding of the Christian doctrine as it applied to life itself. It is evident now, however, that his Mass music must be looked at with the same eye and not as a separate convention as Mozart himself it seems did not distinguish between the sounding of religious and “secular” drama. The musical similitude of the Overture of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and his later Kyrie denotes this relationship, as well as requiring us to turn a new ear to Don Giovanni as a work that sounds Mozart’s enlightened theories of divine love.

The Kyrie(s) and the Overture sound the offer of merciful redemption made in encounters with the divine. While they are marching toward judgment and even death, it is not one of unavoidable damnation, but of eternal invitation to communion, in the cry for pardon.

The music that we hear at the opening of Don Giovanni returns to accompany his encounter with the Commendatore, the stony ghost of the murdered father of one the women he seduced, or raped, in the first scene of the opera. The Commendatore, a tremendous representative of the divine, has come to invite Don Giovanni to dine with him in the afterlife. The music may as well be that which opens Mozart’s Great Mass.

The Kyrie is the first movement of the human toward Communion, and it is one that begs mercy: Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. In this light, the entire opera needs to be looked at in a new way than tradition has followed: rather than looking to

Don Giovanni’s sins in expectation of his inevitable damnation, to look for the ever- present invitation to a return to communion between the sinner and the divine.

Mozart recycled the Kyrie of the Mass in C minor for an oratorio he composed in

1785. This is of particular interest and importance. The oratorio is Davide Penitente, a musical setting of the Penitential Psalms. These are the Penitential Psalms of King David, who, among other things, seduced Bathsheba, the wife of one of his officers whom he had sent to war so he could be with her; he then has her husband murdered and takes

Bathsheba as his own. It is David’s psalm of penitence, his grief of sin, which Mozart sets to this same Kyrie we know so well. “Alzai le flebili voci al Signor, al Dio, da mali oppressi!” It was performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1785—two years after the

Mass in C minor and two years before the opening of Don Giovanni. Caterina Cavalieri sang the soprano part, which would include the spectacular “Christe” section of the

Kyrie and the aria “Tra l’oscure ombre funeste”. For this singer Mozart would revise the

part of Donna Elvira for the Vienna premier, writing the aria “In quali eccessi” specifically for her.

In quali eccessi, o Numi, In what excesses, O Heavens,

in quai misfatti orribili, tremendi In what horrible, terrible crimes

è avvolto il sciagurato! The wretch has involved himself!

Ah no! non puote tardar l'ira del cielo, Ah no! The wrath of Heaven cannot delay,

la giustizia tardar. Justice cannot delay.

Sentir già parmi la fatale saetta, I already sense the fatal bolt

chi gli piomba sul capo! Which is falling on his head!

Aperto veggio il baratro mortal!... I see the mortal abyss open!...

Misera Elvira! che contrasto d'affetti Unhappy Elvira! what a conflict of feelings

in sen ti nasce! Is born in your breast!

Perchè questi sospiri? Why these sighs?

e quest'ambascie? And these pains?

Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata, That ungrateful soul betrayed me,

Infelice, o Dio!, mi fa. O God, how unhappy he made me!

Ma tradita e abbandonata, But though betrayed and abandoned,

Provo ancor per lui pietà. I still know pity for him.

Quando sento il mio tormento, When I feel my suffering,

Di vendetta il cor favella; My heart speaks of vengeance;

Ma, se guardo il suo cimento, But when I see the danger he's in,

Palpitando il cor mi va. My heart beats for him. 53

Opera singers at this time were the most important part of an operatic composition, far above the composers, and significantly influenced the compositions, as the roles were written specifically for them. Many scholars, including James Webster, Thomas Forrest

Kelly, and Pierpaolo Polzonetti, have given great attention to the effect of the singers on their roles and therefore the relationship between roles that a singer has portrayed.

Caterina Cavalieri performed the lead voice both for Davidde Penitente and the part of

Donna Elvira, who shows up to Don Giovanni’s feast just before the Commendatore with her “l’ultima prova dell’amor” and begs him “che vita cangi”.54

It is not only the Overture which has striking parallels with the Kyrie. Certain music of the Act II finale which is not included in the Overture can be heard in the Kyrie in D minor. Just before the Commendatore’s entrance, Donna Elvira screams, which

53 Act II, scene ii

54 Cavalieri also sang the role of Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, singing perhaps the opera’s most famous aria.

Martern aller Arten Tortures of every kind Mögen meiner warten, may await me; Ich verlache Qual und Pein. I scorn torment and pain. Nichts soll mich erschüttern. Nothing will shake my resolve; Nur dann würd' ich zittern, I would tremble only Wenn ich untreu könnte sein. if I were untrue to him. Lass dich bewegen, verschone mich! Be moved to pity, spare me! Des Himmels Segen belohne dich! The heaven's blessing shall reward you! Doch du bist entschlossen. But you are determined. Willig, unverdrossen, Willingly, unflinchingly Wähl ich jede Pein und Not. I accept every pain and grief. Ordne nur, gebiete, Then order, command, Lärme, tobe, wüte, bluster, roar and rage! Zuletzt befreit mich doch der Tod. death will liberate me in the end.

marks the change in music. Don Giovanni responds, “Che grido indiavolato! Leporello, che cos’è?”. Leporello goes to look and reenters, stammering that it is the “l’uomo di sasso…uomo bianco…” and tells us how he knocks: “ta ta ta ta”. The orchestra sounds this emphatic knocking with a pounding unison, four quarter notes in the lower register, the entire orchestra together on the tonic, the final resolution tone of the key: “ta ta ta ta”. In the Kyrie, these same unison quarter notes on the tonic precede the chorus’

“kyrie” and “christe”, but not every one. The quarter notes result in the sounding of a new “kyrie”, as if encountering the Lord anew.

The proximity of Mozart’s music to divinity is proclaimed without hesitation or embarrassment. Alfred Einstein wrote, Mozart sounds God’s glory, “pure sound…triumphant over all chaotic earthliness Bernard Shaw wrote that his is “the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God”. His 1787 opera Don Giovanni, ossia il dissoluto punito, though recognized as one of the greatest operas, it would not be venerated in this way. Though the Commendatore is Mozart’s most explicit staging of a divine presence in any of his operas and though he comes offering redemption, commentary has remained focused on the sinner, the overture itself understood as sounding the inevitable damnation of the sinner. This is not due to the genre, as critics and listeners alike easily recognize both the profane nature of

Mozart’s sacred music and the divine nature of his comic works.55 The fascination with the opera is due to its musical perfection of form and content and with the attractive

55 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 140. “Figaro combines social realism with a radiant moral idealism and a truly Catholic sense of the everyday immanence of the spiritual in the material world.”

and terrible character of Don Giovanni himself and his punishment. Audiences and scholars the same are enchanted by Don Giovanni’s seductions and appetite, often deemed more demon than human, and, of course, the punishment of “il dissoluto”. In the literature about the opera, the discussion of redemption and salvation in Don

Giovanni has gone only as far as to say redemption is absent, his character often deemed demonic and therefore his punishment inevitable. There is excellent commentary that does praise Mozart’s Don Giovanni as transcendent. Scott Burnham refers in his celebrated book Mozart’s Grace to the music as “the threshold of the supernatural”.56 Composer Charles Gounod writes that “the score of Don Giovanni has exercised the influence of a revelation upon the whole of my life; it has been and remains for me a kind of incarnation of dramatic and musical infallibility.”57 Both uphold, however, the traditional reading of the damnation of the sinner as inevitable, signaled in the opening measures of the overture which, Burnham concludes, doesn’t permit us to forget what stands behind the entire opera: “those sovereign chords at the opening, the once and future sound of abject damnation”. Throughout the history of the legend, therefore, there has loomed the sinner’s refusal to repent and his condemnation to eternal punishment. The discussion of divine characteristics of Don

Giovanni revolve around the supernatural, fear of death and judgement, guilt and sin.

56 Scott Burnham, Mozart’s Grace (Princeton University Press, 2014), 30.

57 Charles Gounod, Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Commentary by Charles Gounod (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1970), 23.

The music, of course, can’t be separated from the text. And in fact, the text is incredibly important, not only because Mozart specifically composed the notes to go with those exact words, but because he worked closely with the librettist, Lorenzo Da

Ponte, whose life as a Catholic is a good parallel and illuminator to Mozart’s. Da Ponte, who wrote Mozart’s three most important operas, was a Catholic priest, often dismissed because of his moral lapses—he famously had several lovers and several children—who was extremely well-versed in Dante and never broke off his loving relationship with his

Catholic faith, like Mozart.58

Don Giovanni was presented by Mozart and Da Ponte as a dramma giocoso and it is clear from the Overture that it is not exactly suited for the buffa genre. Neither does the music suit the traditional reading of an encounter with divine retribution and damnation. For Mozart, the music which opens Don Giovanni and returns to accompany his encounter with the ghost of the Commendatore who comes to dinner, calling for his repentance, is music suited for the Mass.

58 Da Ponte’s Memorie are full of episodes of Da Ponte gossiping, womanizing—though always with appreciation of the women—self-promotion, and, most likely, a good number of lies. His memoirs are equally full, however, of episodes of genuine prayer, giving thanks, confession, despair, guilt and regret, and love. His praise of opera and literature goes beyond self-promotion to a genuine love of the subjects and commitment to the truths and beauty that they can give.

FINALE

Jessica Waldoff, in her book Recognition in Mozart’s Operas, noted that, unlike Mozart’s other Da Ponte other operas, the recognition, or reconciliation, scene is missing in Don

Giovanni.59 The research above—Mozart’s involvement in the Catholic Enlightenment, his personal devotion, his operas as sacred music in relation to the Mass, etc.—on the one hand, and on the other hand, history is its own answer. No other opera, and no other Counter-Reformation figure, has drawn such attention from audiences of such a wide array of disciplines. The reconciliation has been left to the audience, as the Mass is for the reform of the living.

In the light of Mozart’s participation in a Catholic Enlightenment and the continuity of his sacred and “secular” music, a new ear must be turned to the entire opera. Muratori wrote: “He who created man is not, indeed, like man, deaf to the voice of imploring supplication and eagerly prone to vengeance: his thoughts are only a peace and pardon; and he himself, both inwardly and outwardly, tenderly strives to reclaim those in rebellion against him, and provided he beholds them sorry.., he is quick in granting pardon, after which he instantly forgets them all, nor ever after makes of them

59 Jessica Waldoff, Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

the smallest matter of the slightest reproach...”60 If the Overture, like the Kyrie, sounds the encounter with a merciful God, who invites sinners at every moment to communion with him, then we must tune our ears to the rest of the opera to hear the notes of pardon available for this libertine, Don Giovanni, rather than his just damnation for his sins. And a new ear must be opened, too, to Mozart himself, to listen for a truer sounding of an understanding that for Mozart, perhaps, libertinism and Catholicism together meant Enlightenment.

60 Ludovico Muratori, De regolata devotione de' cristiani, (Venice: Albrizzi, 1747), 7. Translation by Alexander Kenny (Dublin: Byrn, 1789), 8.

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