The Don Giovanni Moment

Essays on the Legacy of an Opera

Lydia Goehr, Daniel Herwitz

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510646
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Mozart's Don Giovanni is an operatic masterpiece full of iconic and mythical tensions that still resonate today. The work redefines the terms of power, seduction, and morality, and the resulting conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and romanticism.

The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart's opera in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century. The prominent scholars in this collection address the opera's impact on the philosophical visions of Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Williams and its influence on the literary and dramatic works of Pushkin, Hoffmann, Mörike, Byron, Wagner, Strauss, and Shaw. Through a close and careful analysis of Don Giovanni 's literary and philosophical reception and its many appropriations, rewritings, and retellings, these contributors treat the opera as a vantage point from which theory and philosophy can reconsider romanticism's central themes.

As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart's brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.

One

Don Giovanni: “And what communion hath light with darkness?”

INGRID ROWLAND

It is generally acknowledged that the character we know as Don Juan first emerged about 1630 in Counter-Reformation Spain, the protagonist of a play, El burlador de Sevilla o el convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville; or, the Stone Guest), written by a Spanish friar, Gabriel de Tellez, who took the pseudonym Tirso de Molina.¹ The Burlador, named Don Juan Tenorio, has three good qualities in the eyes of his peers: noble birth, great courage, and adamant fidelity to his word. Otherwise, he is evidently good for nothing: a shameless bully, a seducer, a grandee too quick with his sword who recklessly skewers the father of one of his conquests, the powerful Don Gonzalo. One evening, heaping insult on mortal injury, Tirso’s trickster happens by Don Gonzalo’s tomb, an extravagant marble structure boasting a family chapel with a full-sized portrait statue of Don Juan’s outraged victim.

Tweaking the statue’s stony beard, Don Juan invites the image to dinner on the eve of what is to be the rake’s own wedding night. To Don Juan’s surprise and the delight of Tirso’s audience, the stone guest arrives for dinner and politely, in turn, invites Don Juan to come back to his place for a reciprocal treat. This repast, served in the tomb chapel amid shifting sarcophagi, proves to be a meal of vipers and scorpions, wine replaced by vinegar water. Don Juan’s good breeding emerges in the courtly alacrity with which he downs the repulsive food, but at a certain point a flaming sensation in his inward parts leads him to realize that he has repeated the ancient error of Persephone in Hades: by partaking of this infernal meal he has consecrated himself to the realms of Hell. This first Don Juan is damned, in other words, not because he has been a cad, a rapist, or a murderer, but specifically and exclusively because he has first insulted and then dined with a citizen of the world beyond.² This is why the Stone Guest shares the play’s title; he is as integral to the story as the Don himself.

In devising the Trickster of Seville, Tirso de Molina created a full-blown myth, with a myth’s profound exploration of the relationship between mortal humanity and the supernatural.³ And like every good myth, that of Don Juan was destined for its own glorious afterlife, perhaps never more glorious than during those frenzied weeks of 1787 when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart teamed with the Venetian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte to create their Don Giovanni in the proverbially magic city of Prague.

Myths, however, seldom spring full-blown from the head of a single creator. Don Juan’s myth had been abuilding for centuries, if not, as his connection with the Persephone story suggests, for far longer than that. Like Persephone, he had certainly been baked in the sun of southern Europe, where ancient Greek statues had often been rumored to talk and occasionally to come to life.⁴ Medieval Madonnas and crucifixes, in Italy especially, followed in the same pattern, and in the fifteenth century a rediscovered Greek manuscript bearing the name of Thrice Great Hermes, Hermes Trismegistos, asserted to scholars of the dawning Italian Renaissance that the ancient Egyptians had employed statues to call down and localize the powers of heaven.⁵ By some fifty years before the writing of Tirso de Molina’s Trickster of Seville, the Don, or someone very much like him, seems to have been on the mind of an Italian expatriate in the England of Elizabeth I. This volatile soul, in fact, would perish, like the Spanish grandee of story and song, enveloped in flames, although those flames came not from Hell itself but from a stake erected by the secular arm of the Roman Inquisition.

The Italian expatriate was Giordano Bruno, the defrocked Dominican friar who met his end at dawn on February 17, 1600, in Rome for espousing an abundant set of heretical principles.⁶ These heresies included the contention that the sun was the center of but one planetary system in an infinite universe, belief in an immortal world soul, pronounced skepticism about the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, and utter certainty that his own philosophy, a mixture of Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, new science, and ancient mnemonic arts, would offer its practitioners a more secure path to enlightenment than any of his century’s prevailing religions. Bruno came from Nola, a small town in the hinterland of Naples, and throughout his life referred to himself in the third person as “il Nolano” and to his credo as the “Nolan philosophy.” But Nola held il Nolano for only a short time; after entering the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples at seventeen (one of the places, in fact, where a crucifix once spoke to St. Thomas Aquinas), he began to exhibit both his genius and his ungovernable temperament. After a brush with the Inquisition sent him running from Naples in 1576, he spent the rest of his life on the move and in trouble; like Don Juan Tenorio, he chafed under the bonds of conventional morality but could never abandon it altogether.

Giordano Bruno’s connection to Don Juan and to statues will require some elaboration; it stems from a remark near the beginning of what may be his most brilliant creation, the vernacular dialogue La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), written and printed in London early in 1584.⁷ Italian books had a lively market in England, the country under Elizabeth I was filled with Italians and Italophiles, beginning with the queen herself, who conversed wittily in just the kind of courtly vernacular that prevailed in Florence and Rome. Her language was not quite the same language as Bruno’s Neapolitan, heavily laced as it was with Spanish expressions, but in those days preceding the attack of the Spanish Armada there were many learned Londoners who knew Spanish as well. La Cena de le Ceneri was printed by a London printer, John Charlewood, who added to the book’s international flavor by claiming to have printed it in Paris.

Bruno set his Cena de le Ceneri in London in the Lenten season of 1584, not long after an invitation to lecture at Oxford had met with dismal failure.⁸ The university, firmly committed to Aristotle’s philosophy and the world system of Ptolemy, had invited Bruno to debate the validity of Copernican astronomy with a local don, but after his first appearance he was accused of having simply plagiarized the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. This accusation threw Bruno into one of his proverbial rages; as he saw it, his adversary, Dr. Underhill, was an arid pedant who failed to see the radical originality with which Nolan philosophy departed from Ficino’s Neoplatonism—and although Bruno’s philosophy does in fact bear a notable debt to Ficino, it does depart as radically as he claimed. It is unlikely, however, that the Oxford audience could have heard this originality through Bruno’s thick accent and effusive gestures, especially as the dons were not particularly sympathetic to Ficino or Copernicus, let alone to Bruno himself.⁹ Nor would they have much of a chance to clarify their thinking: the tiny Italian stormed back to London and his rooms in the French Embassy.

In the French ambassador’s residence, among embassy staff and the courtiers of the Virgin Queen, Bruno found more congenial company. He made friends with the dashing poet Sir Philip Sidney and with two men who also appear in the Ash Wednesday supper: Fulke Greville and the Anglo-Italian writer John Florio, who lived, like Bruno, in the French Embassy between Fleet Street and the River Thames. La Cena de le Ceneri could count, therefore, on a substantial reading public in London. Though he claimed to know only a few words of English, Bruno got by in Italian, French, and Latin; indeed, his command of these languages had already allowed him to dwell among Dominican friars in Naples and Rome, Swiss Calvinists in Geneva, freethinking French courtiers in Paris, and the disparate denizens of several places in between. Yet if his facility with language afforded him the means to live among a varied assortment of his fellow creatures, Bruno’s ill-concealed impatience with stupidity, his arrogance, and his incandescent temper fits always urged him to move on under a cloud of opprobrium. His escape from Naples had earned him defrocking from the priesthood, expulsion from the Dominican order, and excommunication from the Catholic Mass.¹⁰ A tartly critical pamphlet he published after little over a month in Geneva brought him to trial for libel and excommunication from the Calvinist communion.¹¹ By the time Bruno reached London, he was probably Christian only in the most tenuous sense; by the end of his life, in most respects, he was no longer Christian at all.¹²

He arrived in an England still searching for a resolution of its own religious situation. As for academic matters, Bruno would show in La Cena de le Ceneri that the English were if anything more dogmatic than their peers on the Continent. The dialogue begins by reporting an encounter between Fulke Greville and himself near Fleet Street:¹³

Prithee, Signor Nolano, let me know the reasons why you believe that the earth moves. To which [the Nolan] replied: he could furnish him no reason whatsoever without knowing his capabilities, and not knowing the extent to which he would be understood he feared doing as those people do who say their piece to statues and go off to converse with the dead. Would [Greville] then please first make himself better known by proposing the reasons that persuaded him to the contrary, because according to the brightness and power of mind he might demonstrate in adducing these [reasons, the Nolan] could give him appropriate answers.

Better still, Bruno said that he would like to debate qualified proponents of Ptolemaic cosmology, an idea to which Greville eagerly assented.

Next Wednesday, eight days from now, which will be Ash Wednesday, you will be invited to a banquet with many gentlemen and learned persons, so that after eating we may hold a discussion of many fine things.¹⁴

The Nolan assented, “But, I pray you, do not bring ignoble persons before me, ill educated and ill versed in similar speculations.”¹⁵

The dialogue continues by detailing how Bruno’s high expectations were systematically dashed, beginning with the schedule. Banqueting in Italy meant an invitation for midday, but by lunchtime on Ash Wednesday Bruno, having heard nothing, went off with some Italian friends. He returned at dusk to find his housemate John Florio and their friend Matthew Gwynne at the embassy door, nervously waiting to collect him for supper. The Nolan urged them to calm themselves:

“Up to now only one thing has gone wrong for me; that I had hoped to conduct this business in the light of day, and I see that the debate will happen by candlelight. . . . But now,” said the Nolan, “let us set out, and pray that God will guide us in this dark evening, on so long a journey, down such hazardous streets.”¹⁶

Ash Wednesday, the penitential holy day that marks the beginning of Lent, is not normally marked off by feasting but by abstinence, the stark climax of Shrove Tuesday’s gluttonous revels. Catholic tradition counted penitence among the seven sacraments; English Protestants reduced this number to the two ceremonies explicitly attested in the Gospel: Baptism and Communion (or, as they termed it, the Lord’s Supper). By inviting guests to dinner on a day that Catholics normally devoted to fasting, Bruno’s Protestant hosts made public their own position in the religi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Don Giovanni: “And what communion hath light with darkness?”
• 2. Don Juan and Faust: On the Interaction Between Two Literary Myths
• 3. “Hidden Secrets of the Self”: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Reading of Don Giovanni
• 4. Don Juan in Nicholas’s Russia (Pushkin’s The Stone Guest)
• 5. Mörike’s Mozart and the Scent of a Woman
• 6. The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Giovanni in Romantic Music and Culture
• 7. Don Juan as an Idea
• 8. Kierkegaard Writes His Opera
• 9. The Curse and Promise of the Absolutely Musical: Tristan und Isolde and Don Giovanni
• 10. Authority and Judgment in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Wagner’s Ring
• 11. Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Shaw’s Comedy
• 12. Giovanni auf Naxos
• 13. Homage to Adorno’s “Homage to Zerlina”
• 14. Adorno and the Don