Mozart's Opera, Don Giovanni

The purpose of this research is to trace the development of the main character in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background of the opera and the climate in which Don Giovanni emerges, and then to focus on the way the operatic structure, and in particular the music itself, facilitates showing the moral and theatrical complexity of the character.

The excessive behavior of the hero of the Don Juan myth is legendary, and the libretto of Don Giovanni, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is faithful to the legend. Don Giovanni, indeed, is concerned with one thing only: seduction. His excessively cynical, impious detachment in regard to what he calls love is so extreme and so unlikely, in the realistic scheme of things, to remain unpunished that only hell can contain them. His singlemindedness, as much as its content, dooms him utterly. As the Statue Don Giovanni has so callously invited to dinner points out, "Now is the fatal moment! Repent or face damnation! . . . Heaven demands repentance!" (Don Giovanni II.14). The fact that the Statue gives Don Giovanni only one chance to redeem himself may seem an abrupt turn of dramatic action, but throughout the action of the drama, Don Giovanni has done little except seduce and abandon one woman after an other; indeed, he has come to the banquet fresh from his newest conquest, his servant Leporello's mistress. One chance is enough for a scoundrel like that, and Don Giovanni does not take i

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c to move and disturb and the original conception of the sexual scoundrel. When, at the beginning of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the Don kills the Commendatore, and in one burst of glorious music the murderer, his mistress, his servant and the dying man all express their feelings, opera provides a real extension of the human faculties. No wonder that hte music is rather complicated, because even today our feelings about Don Giovanni are far from simple. He is the most ambiguous of herovillains. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed to simple and lifegiving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation (Clark 243). In this view, Mozart's music becomes an aspect of social criticism or at any rate of character critique because it makes the psychological connection that puts the audience in touch with a failure of belief and of decency. For crimes against the authentic order of society, such as keeping young lovers from marrying, ruining sweet love matches of peasants for an aristocratic and sordid roll in the hay, or setting the "shoulds" and "o

Category: Arts - M