Mozart and His Operas by David Cairns

Author:David Cairns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

One of the most implausible of all Da Ponte’s recollections is that Mozart had to be persuaded to make the work a comedy. The coexistence of serious and comic is of the essence of Mozartian opera. In Don Giovanni the two elements are so deeply interfused as not to be separable. They are of one substance. The “comic” characters no less than the “serious” are subject to the same overmastering force. (Only the duet for Leporello and Zerlina, added for the Vienna production in 1788, lacks this driven quality.) To the end there is no letting up. At the final curtain, when the actors have stepped chorus-like out of the action to proclaim the conventional moral – “This is the fate of all evil-doers” – the brief orchestral epilogue surges unstoppably on to the violent final chords, while oboe and bassoons repeat the descending chromatic phrase associated all through the opera with the anti-hero and his fatal influence. A moment before, a dazzling trumpet arpeggio strides down the notes of the common chord, a last reminder of the imperious personality that divine retribution had rid them of. At the same time the inimitable duality of the work holds sway to the last. Even as the woodwind recall that wailing chromatic motif, the violins’ exuberant trills, as Andrew Steptoe remarks, “suggest the bustle of everyday life and the return to normality”.

I shall never forget the experience I had the first time I heard Mozart’s C minor Mass. Suddenly I was transported to another world by the passage near the end of the Quoniam where solo voices, accompanied by sustained woodwind, softly repeat “altissimus” in a panting rhythm against offbeat string chords – an almost identical pattern of melody, harmony and orchestral colour as at the end of the duet for Donna Anna and Don Ottavio in the opening scene of the opera. For a moment the Mass was forgotten in the enveloping frisson of Don Giovanni.

Is there any other opera that has this spellbinding effect, the almost palpable emanation that rises before you like a physical presence and takes you over body and soul when you hear a passage from it? E. T. A. Hoffmann called it “the opera of all operas”. Rossini, when asked which of his own works he preferred, replied, “Don Giovanni.” It is a matter not simply of the power, undimmed after more than two centuries, of the scene where the Statue, whose voice has already chilled us in the graveyard, comes to supper and the unrepentant libertine is dragged down to hell. Nor is it just because of the music of Giovanni himself, the mania which Mozart makes unmistakably clear in the obsessive repetitions that are so characteristic of his role: the touch of hysteria in the Ds and E flats in the so-called champagne aria, “Fin ch’han dal vino”, the relentless “Io mi voglio divertir” and “Vivan le femmine” in the supper scene. The whole score has a demonic quality. Every emotion seems raised beyond normal pitch.

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