Composer Profile - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
By Paul Griffiths

Things that are deep black, like jet or coal, can be so cut and polished that they shine, even dazzle. Don Giovanni is like this: a black piece, one that opens at night, onto a scene dominated by low voices, in the dark key of D-minor (the key to which Mozart was to return in his Requiem), and yet also a piece of terrific brio and brilliance. How did it come about, this black glitter?

Mozart was 31 and married, with a two-year-old son. No longer as fashionable in Vienna as he had been a few years before, he had found himself a new audience in Prague, where a production of The Marriage of Figaro in January 1787 was a triumph. He went there himself to take charge of the musical performance and also to present a symphony he had written for the occasion, the grand one in D-major we know as "The Prague." The theater manager, delighted by the success of Figaro, asked the composer to return with a new opera in the fall, and, with that commission in his pocket, he got together when he was back in Vienna with his Figaro librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.

Da Ponte was a few years older; writing opera librettos had become part of his routine. He was turning them out at the rate of three or four each season, for composers much more popular than Mozart-composers like Vicente Martín y Soler, with whom he had just created the hit Una Cosa Rara (to be quoted in the supper scene of Don Giovanni). But perhaps he recognized that Mozart's music had a range and a depth far beyond any contemporary. Or perhaps one more libretto here or there was no great challenge-especially when a Don Giovanni text by another Italian librettist already existed, and could be cribbed from. In any event, he accepted the task, and the new opera was duly ready for Prague to hear in October.

Some people have tried to find autobiographical elements in it. Mozart's father died in May 1787, while the composer was writing this opera in which an aged man returns from the grave to reprove the younger central figure. And that central figure is a multiple seducer, as da Ponte was, if we are to believe his memoirs: flagrant womanizing, he tells us, had got him banished from Venice, where he had followed simultaneously the avocations of poet, priest and Lothario.

But Don Giovanni is not a self portrait on the part of either the librettist or the composer. Indeed, Don Giovanni is hardly a character at all, more a force-an amoral force, to be sure. His music rushes, too fast for him to disclose himself. More disturbing than that, the other characters are presented to us from the viewpoint of this amoral force. It is hard to sympathize with Donna Elvira, who behaves so recklessly, or with Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, whose love exists in a cool world of decorum. If Don Giovanni were a morality play, these people would represent the good, the solid, the admirable. But the floorboards of morality have fallen away, and we are in Don Giovanni's swirl, where there is no good and no evil, only action and desire and laughter.

Hence the blackness and the brilliance.

The singers who first had to engage with this unnerving world were those who had taken part in Figaro nine months before. Mozart wrote the opera for them, and must have remembered the roles they had taken before. He created the part of Don Giovanni for the man who had been the Count in Figaro: Luigi Bassi, only 22 at the time. Maintaining the servant/master relationship in this very different ambience, the first Leporello was the singer who had played Figaro: Felice Ponziani. (Italian singers dominated the opera in Prague, just as in Vienna.)

Don Giovanni follows Figaro as night follows day. It might be the Count's dream. In becoming Don Giovanni, he is released from the obligations that bound him in Figaro. But he is released also from himself; he becomes nothing-a drive, incapable of fulfilment. This second Mozart-da Ponte opera might be rather the Count's nightmare.

The piece was esteemed in Prague, but not in Vienna, where it was presented the next year. Vienna preferred Figaro, and it was Figaro again that won Mozart and da Ponte a commission from Vienna for a third opera, Così fan tutte, which had its first performance in January 1790.

Within two years of that, Mozart was dead and da Ponte had moved on, first to London, then to New York. There he became, in his late seventies, professor of Italian at Columbia, and there, too, nearly 40 years after the Prague première, he witnessed New York's first encounter with this unsettling masterpiece.

Paul Griffiths was for ten years the chief music critic of the Times of London and then a music critic of the New Yorker and the New York Times. He is also the author of many books and several librettos. He divides his time between southwest Wales and New York City. © Paul Griffiths, 2007, all rights reserved.