• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

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 by Lesley Grace Sullivan _____________________________________ Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Director Graduate Program in Romance Languages and Literatures Notre Dame, Indiana April 2016 © Copyright 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 1 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!” 2 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, 3 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.

Load more

  50

Copy Link