The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · a dramma giocoso in two acts, K. 527, to a libretto in Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte · twenty-six numbers and an overture, in the standard performing version: the Prague score of 1787 with two numbers written for Vienna in 1788
Mode
Dramma giocoso; a comic opera that holds a killing, a ball and a damnation, with serious, half-serious and comic characters in one ensemble
Mythos
The stone guest: the father killed, invited to supper in stone, the handshake and the descent; the seducer who will take any woman
Phase
One last day of failed seductions, from a killing at night to a supper with the dead; D minor at the first bar, D major at the last
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in two acts, twenty-six numbers and an overture in the standard performing version, setting Da Ponte’s Italian, with secco recitative between the numbers
Register
From Leporello’s patter and the catalogue to seria coloratura, a dying man’s trio and the statue’s trombones
Scale
Eight roles, three orders of society, three dances at once; one city, one last day
Governing Proposition
A nobleman who fails at every seduction the stage shows is followed through his last day by the women he has wronged, the servant who keeps his list and the dead man he has invited to supper, until he refuses to repent and is taken down. The wager of the work is that desire which will take any object is both the life of the world and the ruin of persons, and that the order which destroys it is just, and smaller.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The opera begins with its end. The overture opens Andante, in D minor, on heavy chords and the music the stone guest will bring to supper in the last scene, heard before a word has been sung or a character named. Then a Molto allegro in D major sets off at speed. It does not close. It turns to F major and runs straight into the first number, and Mozart wrote a separate ending so that it could be played in concert. In the theatre there is no pause between the warning and the comedy it frames.
No. 1, the Introduzione, is a whole action in music. It opens in F major with Leporello’s complaint, “Notte e giorno faticar” (“Toiling night and day”): he would play the gentleman himself and serve no more. Then Donna Anna drives Giovanni out of her house, her father, the Commendatore, fights him, and in the chase and the duel the old man is killed. Patter, pursuit and swordplay pass without a break in the music.
The death is set as a trio for three basses in F minor: the dying father, the killer and the servant, three low voices in one slow texture where a moment before there was patter. The killing that opens this comic opera is the debt the last number collects. In No. 2, the duet “Fuggi, crudele, fuggi”, Anna and her betrothed, Don Ottavio, turn grief into vengeance. The day that follows is the seducer’s last, and it is a run of failure: of every attempt the stage shows him making, not one succeeds.
Movement II
Donna Elvira enters in No. 3, “Ah chi mi dice mai”, a woman he has abandoned. Then comes Leporello’s list. No. 4, “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” (“Little lady, this is the catalogue”), is in D major, Allegro, and it counts: in Italy six hundred and forty, in Germany two hundred and thirty-one, in France a hundred, in Turkey ninety-one, and in Spain “mille e tre” (“a thousand and three”). The sum is 2,065. Spain, named last, is nearly half of it alone.
Then the aria slows to an Andante con moto in 3/4, a minuet, and the counting gives way to the rule: he takes any woman at all, so long as she wears a skirt. It is comedy by enumeration, addressed, as its first word says, to a lady. The next woman is already in view. Zerlina is marrying Masetto, and the peasants sing the wedding chorus in No. 5. Giovanni offers her a lord’s protection, and Masetto, in No. 6, “Ho capito, signor sì” (“I understand, yes, sir”), says that he understands what it means.
No. 7, “Là ci darem la mano” (“There we will give each other our hands”), is in A major, an Andante in 2/4. He proposes, and she answers with his own tune, to words that say she would and would not. The exchanges grow shorter, the phrases closer, until the 2/4 gives way to a 6/8 Allegro and they sing together, going off as one. It is seduction made as form: his music taken into her voice. Then Elvira breaks in, with No. 8, “Ah fuggi il traditor” (“Ah, flee the traitor”), in Handelian dotted rhythms, the old serious style turned on him, and the seduction fails.
Movement III
The wronged begin to gather. The quartet, No. 9, “Non ti fidar, o misera” (“Do not trust him, unhappy woman”), holds four minds in one texture. Anna’s recitative and aria, No. 10, “Don Ottavio, son morta!” and “Or sai chi l’onore”, in D major, is the serious style at full height. Ottavio answers with “Dalla sua pace”, in G major, written for Vienna in 1788 for the tenor Francesco Morella and kept in the version sung today. Its beauty stops the clock; it does not move the plot.
Giovanni’s first solo comes next, and it is not about himself. No. 11, “Fin ch’han dal vino”, is a Presto in B flat, and it is orders for a party. Zerlina’s No. 12, “Batti, batti, o bel Masetto” (“Beat me, beat me, handsome Masetto”), is a plain buffa tune over a solo cello. Then the Act I finale, which opens with the masks’ trio, “Protegga il giusto cielo” (“May just heaven protect”), a prayer sung before the ball.
Inside, the ball. Three small orchestras on the stage play a minuet in 3/4, a contredanse in 2/4 and a German dance in 3/8 at once, three dances for three orders of society, class heard as metre under one beat. Liberty is hailed where the liberty is Giovanni’s. Then Zerlina screams, and the scream breaks all three dances. The act ends in C major. He has failed again, and the failure is in public.
Movement IV
Act II begins as a chain of disguises. Giovanni puts on his servant’s clothes and, dressed as Leporello, sings No. 16, the canzonetta “Deh vieni alla finestra” (“Come, I pray, to the window”), in D major with a mandolin, a serenade in another man’s clothes to Elvira’s maid, who never appears. Masetto’s arrival cuts it short. No. 17, “Metà di voi qua vadano” (“Half of you go this way”), he sings in Leporello’s voice, and Masetto is beaten in the dark.
Those are the title role’s three solos: orders for a party, a serenade to a woman unseen, and a number sung as someone else. He has none in which he speaks of himself. The rest of the act’s middle is entrances and escapes: Zerlina’s “Vedrai, carino”, the sextet in E flat, No. 19, “Sola, sola in buio loco”, Leporello’s plea for mercy, Ottavio’s “Il mio tesoro intanto”, in B flat. Then the second Vienna number, Elvira’s “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata” (“That ungrateful soul betrayed me”), in E flat, written for Caterina Cavalieri: betrayed, and still pitying him.
Then a cemetery, and the Commendatore in stone. Giovanni laughs, and the statue answers him, with trombones and winds, that his laughter will end before the dawn. In the duet No. 22, “O statua gentilissima” (“O most courteous statue”), the dead man is addressed with a host’s courtesy. The music has stopped being comedy and has not left it. Anna follows with No. 23, the rondò “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio” (“Do not tell me, my fair beloved”), in F major, seria coloratura held apart from everything round it.
Movement V
The finale, No. 24, opens in D major at a supper. A wind band on the stage plays tunes of the day: Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara, Sarti’s Fra i due litiganti, and Mozart’s own “Non più andrai” from Figaro, which Leporello knows all too well. He eats from his master’s table. Elvira makes a last plea. Then the statue enters, in D minor, to the music of the overture’s opening, with trombones: invited, he has come.
He asks for Giovanni’s hand in pledge, and Giovanni gives it. Scales climb and fall beneath them; the statue commands him to repent, he refuses; a chorus sounds from below, and he is taken down. In the scena ultima the survivors gather and say where life now goes: a convent for Elvira, an inn, a supper at home, and for Ottavio a year’s delay from Anna. Together they sing the fable’s moral, that such is the end of whoever does evil, in D major. Life resumes, smaller. The full title is Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (“The rake punished, or Don Giovanni”).
Da Ponte wrote the libretto after Bertati’s one-act Don Giovanni, which Gazzaniga had set for Venice in February 1787; Prague had commissioned the opera after cheering Figaro. It was first performed at the Nostitz Theatre in Prague, now the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787, with Mozart conducting, and at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 7 May 1788, with three new numbers. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan” of 1813 made it “die Oper aller Opern”, and Chopin’s variations on “Là ci darem la mano” drew Schumann’s “Hut ab, ihr Herren, ein Genie!” (“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”). The autograph passed through Pauline Viardot to the Paris Conservatoire, and is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. What the work shows has outlasted every reading of it: the energy and the ruin as one thing, and the world without him smaller.
Act III · The Twelve
The action is a seducer’s last day, and he fails at every attempt the stage shows: Anna drives him from her house, Elvira breaks in on Zerlina after No. 7, Zerlina screams at the ball, and Masetto’s arrival cuts short the serenade to Elvira’s maid. The run of failure is the plot, and it ends at the table; the Commendatore dies in No. 1 so that No. 24 can happen. What holds the axis here is the number form and the version. The Act II middle, a chain of disguises, captures and escapes, is the most separable stretch, and Ottavio’s two arias halt the action. On the Prague score alone, two tenths higher.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: desire that will take any object is both the life of the world and the ruin of persons, and the order that destroys it is just, and smaller. The catalogue gives the rule: any woman, so long as she wears a skirt. The music gives Giovanni life’s energy and the order its terror. Masetto’s “Ho capito, signor sì” (“I understand, yes, sir”) knows what a lord’s protection means, and liberty is hailed at a ball where the liberty is Giovanni’s. The women answer three ways: Anna with vengeance, Zerlina half willing, Elvira still pitying him. Held down because Giovanni himself stays opaque, and the closing moral is a fable’s stock line.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The statue scene stands at the ceiling. The overture’s D minor chords return with trombones as the stone guest keeps the invitation to supper; he commands repentance, Giovanni answers no, and a chorus sounds from below. Other summits: the overture’s opening; the death trio in F minor for three basses; the cemetery, where the statue answers Giovanni’s laughter with trombones; the masks’ trio, “Protegga il giusto cielo” (“May just heaven protect”). Beauty is frequent too: “Là ci darem la mano”, “Dalla sua pace”, “Deh vieni alla finestra”, “Non mi dir”. Held off the top by frequency: the secco recitative is ground level by design, and so is much of the Act II disguise plot.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, not cited: Don Juan, one of the few myths the modern world made, is built here again. The father killed in No. 1 returns in stone in No. 24; the invitation to the dead is sealed with a handshake, and the descent follows. The stone guest bears the load from the first bar, since the overture holds his music, so the whole opera stands under its end. The particular stays particular: Leporello eats from his master’s table, and Masetto is beaten in the dark. Held below on two counts: the myth was built before, by El burlador de Sevilla and then Molière, Goldoni and Bertati; and Giovanni has no music of his own self.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is opera buffa, and the Don Juan story as popular comedy with a fireworks hell. The departures are real: seria, mezzo carattere and buffa characters share scenes and ensembles; a comic opera opens with a killing and ends with a damnation scored as tragedy; the ball sounds three metres at once; the overture is built from the last scene. The stake was moderate. Prague commissioned the work after cheering Figaro, and Gazzaniga had set the subject in Venice that February. Figaro had made the ensemble finale into drama, Idomeneo and Gluck’s Alceste had given trombones to the voice from beyond, and Gluck’s ballet Don Juan (1761) had ended in a D minor inferno.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that seduction is music. Giovanni has no aria of his own self; he lives in other people’s music. In “Là ci darem la mano” he proposes, Zerlina answers with his tune to her own hesitating words, and the exchanges shorten; then 2/4 gives way to 6/8 and they sing together. No play can do that. At the ball a minuet, a contredanse and a German dance sound together, class as metre, until Zerlina’s scream breaks all three. Held down where the number form is a container: Vienna slotted in new arias, and the secco recitative carries plot without carrying the knowledge.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and more than two centuries of it: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan” (1813), in which Anna loves her seducer; Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843), on the opera as the one perfect union of medium and idea; Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (1983), which reads the dances as social meaning. The work stays open. What happened in Anna’s room before the curtain is never settled; nor whether Giovanni’s refusal is damnation or heroism, or whether the scena ultima restores or diminishes. Performance is unsettled too: Prague or Vienna, the scena ultima kept or cut, Giovanni as aristocrat, rebel or predator. Held below the top because part of the depth is the myth’s.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that a comic opera could hold death, damnation and the sublime without dropping its comedy, made the ensemble the place where class and desire are heard together, and gave the Don Juan subject its lasting form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hoffmann called it “die Oper aller Opern” (“the opera of all operas”), and Kierkegaard built a philosophy of music on it. Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt took up its music; Pushkin, Mörike and Shaw its story; Forman’s Amadeus (1984) its statue scene. Held below the top because its reach ran more through literature and philosophy than through operatic form.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: the opera is a staple of every major house, it is still played in the Prague theatre where it opened, and its autograph survives. It has outlived each reading of it and absorbed opposite ones. Some of its surface is fixed to its moment. The supper quotes hits of the 1780s, Una cosa rara and Fra i due litiganti, whose jokes now need notes; only the Figaro tune still lands. The secco recitative and harpsichord continuo, the class conventions of the dramma giocoso, and a seducer’s comedy now often read as assault and staged against itself all date it. So does a version question that has never been closed.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Character is drawn by style: Elvira’s Handelian dotted rhythms in “Ah fuggi il traditor”, Anna’s seria coloratura in “Non mi dir”, Zerlina’s plain tune over solo cello in “Batti, batti”. Colour is saved: trombones for the statue, mandolin for the serenade, a wind band at supper. The overture’s slow introduction is the statue scene, and its open end runs into an Introduzione that is a through-composed action of patter, chase, duel and death trio. Da Ponte’s verse is supple and made to be sung. Held below the top by construction: the Act II disguise plot is a chain of entrances and escapes, and the scena ultima follows Bertati’s plan.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the catalogue aria and the statue’s demand for repentance. One law governs them: the comic and the terrible in one frame. Leporello witnesses both, his patter beneath the trombones, cowering at the table while his master refuses. The D minor of the overture’s opening and the D major of the close bind the first bar to the last, and dramma giocoso names the law outright. At the ball, three classes and three metres obey one beat until the scream. The strains are real: the scena ultima returns to comedy after the damnation, heard as the law restated or as a break; the Act II middle wanders; Ottavio’s arias stop time.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders are held, and held together: eros, from the catalogue to Zerlina’s hesitation; class and its claim on bodies, at Zerlina’s own wedding; labour, in Leporello’s wish in No. 1 to play the gentleman and serve no more; the family, in a father and daughter, a betrothal, a wedding and Elvira abandoned; festival at the ball; appetite at the supper; honour, vengeance and the duel; death, the dead and the sacred. The supper alone holds appetite, music, a servant eating his master’s food, the dead and damnation in one scene. What holds the axis here is absence: history, the natural order and the state do not appear, and justice is left to a ghost.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.6, then The Imperishable and The Made at 9.5. More than two centuries of return, from Hoffmann and Kierkegaard to the readings of its dances, with what happened in Anna’s room and what Giovanni’s refusal means still open; a staple of every house, outliving each reading of it; and a command of the medium in which character is drawn by style and colour is saved for its moment.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6, held by the number form and the version: the Act II chain of disguises is the most separable stretch, and Ottavio’s two arias, one from Prague and one from Vienna, halt the action; on the Prague score alone it would stand two tenths higher. Next above it, The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.8: a proven subject on roads Gluck and Mozart had built, and a world without history, nature or the state.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.1 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score and libretto of Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, K. 527, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored in its standard performing version: the Prague score of 1787, with Ottavio’s “Dalla sua pace” and Elvira’s “Mi tradì” from Vienna in 1788, “Il mio tesoro” kept, the Vienna duet for Zerlina and Leporello left out, and the scena ultima played. Like the conflated King Lear, it is a version neither 1787 nor 1788 gave, and where that bears on a score the entry says so. Words and music are scored together, on Da Ponte’s Italian as Mozart set it. Italian is quoted only in the titles of numbers and in the catalogue’s count; every other line is given in plain English. Every English gloss is the desk’s own and is not charged to the work. The numbers were counted by version, act and role, and the catalogue summed, by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the Prague cast and the libretto’s scene count, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.