Six Figures: Real and Imaginary

Abstract

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, described as a “dramma giocoso” (a genre recognized at that time as trying to combine the elements of opera seria and opera buffa), was first performed in Prague on the night of 29 October 1787³⁴ and, a year later, in Vienna. Years after Mozart’s death, Da Ponte was to claim that the young genius, preoccupied from his earliest years by death and religion, had originally wished to make this a wholly serious work. But coming as it does from a happy period of his life to which we owe, among other works, his most beautiful (and optimistic) piano concerto in C no. 21, he must have easily been convinced to include the many amusing, even funny, parts we find in the completed work (which thus fully justify the sub-title of the opera). The darkness of the composer’s life-long preoccupation with death as well as the forbidding Majesty of the Lord begged for forgiveness in his Requiem, are thus not constantly present in this magnificent work, even though the hero is an amoral libertine who commits murder in the first scene, shows mental cruelty towards some of his lovers, and finally meets with his just deserts by being hurled into hell. Notwithstanding these less pleasant aspects of the opera, I call this a “magnificent” work and do so despite many criticisms expressed about the “character” of the eponymous hero.

The first performance was, in fact, scheduled for the 14th but it had to be postponed twice, first because the score was not completed and then because one of the female singers fell ill. Even so, the “supper scene” at the end of the opera was worked out with the singers during the prova generale while the overture was completed on the eve of the 28th.