James Conlon reflects on Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ and his classic anti-hero

The story of Don Juan has been around at least since the early 17th century, and his legend has grown to the point that each century has had its say on the subject. Our own, not yet barely passed two decades, is still busy with it. Like the chameleon its eponymous antagonist is, it has been wrapped in many different philosophical and literary garments. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte conferred on the subject a seriousness and universality that has insured its permanence in our culture. This article purports to do very little but to bear witness to that phenomenon. Like The Marriage of Figaro, its plot is located at the nexus of sexual and class politics. It portrays burning social issues that our contemporary society is grappling with: the victimization through sexual abuse of women, and the suppression of the rights of the unprivileged at the hands of a more powerful social class. 

But of the many implications of this extremely complex narrative, there is an overwhelming presence that, at the beginning and the end, orients the listener. And it is accomplished without a word of text, nor preamble, nor explanation. The terrifying power of the key of D minor, in the hands of the transcendent genius of Mozart, tells us that this is a cautionary tale, illustrating the fate of those who transgress without repentance. The composer, so generous in his own clemency, pardons almost every character in his operas, but here has made a stunning and powerful exception. In an era when portrayal of death on the stage was relatively rare, Mozart presents us the protagonist’s damnation in full view.

Mozart dared the unthinkable: to render the rigorous application of religious law in the theater. He depicts the terror of eternal punishment in such an arresting manner that his association of death with the key D minor reigned well into the 20th century. Few composers have scaled those heights. Mozart’s model seems unsurpassable.

Mozart’s moral position concerning the protagonist is clear, and despite much of the literary musing of subsequent centuries, remains unmistakable. The moral decay, the cruelty, and the malignant antisocial narcissism of the man we know as Don Giovanni merited a powerful and definitive punishment. The music alone is unmistakable in delivering that castigation. The final scene is awe-inspiring, such that neither believer nor non-believer can remain indifferent to its terrors.

By the end of the 18th century, the subject of Don Juan seemed to be exhausting itself when Mozart and da Ponte alighted on it. Had it not been for them, the story might have disappeared altogether. But they produced a work of transcendent genius, transformed the story of Don Juan and, whether intentionally or not, gave birth to Don Giovanni, a modern myth.

This cautionary tale of evil punished, and the infinite complexity, richness, and ambiguity of the human soul, inspired each age to see it through its particular lens. As the 19th century gradually lost interest in sin and salvation and reshaped itself, it saw him as a reflection of its own yearnings and search for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust had his quest, it was said, and Don Giovanni his conquest. He was for some an “anti-hero” who drove himself to self-destruction through his insatiable drives and dragged others along with him. Another point of view was that the Don was a melancholy protagonist of a self-defined drama, in search of some illusionary antisocial grail of his own making. In each case, the 19th century often contradicted itself but found a use for this story to say something about its own preoccupations. It saw a mirrored image of itself.

In the 20th century, the Don was to undergo a radically different evaluation under the microscope of psychoanalysis. The earlier portrait of a flawed but defiant hero of Romanticism, in all of the ambiguity that image suggests, gave way to a psychopathic criminal. His malignant narcissism exhibited every form of neurosis and pathology imaginable.

And so on. Each age — including our own, here at Ravinia on Aug. 11 and 13 — sees in him and his story a reflection of its own world view. He now rightfully no longer represents anything good: he is a criminal predator, serial seducer, and rapist. He is an abuser of women and all society, a paradigm of patriarchal privilege. Today we must differentiate between the character of Don Giovanni and the eponymous opera. Mozart and da Ponte tell a fascinating tale. One searches in vain to find evidence of any sign of Mozart’s sympathy for him. To the contrary, the work countenances neither his essence nor his behavior.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been and will be seen as all things to all people: monstrous sexual predator, amoral iconoclast, devil, intellectual pioneer, free agent of anarchy and nihilism, self-styled defender of Rationalism, mentally deranged psychopath. The list could be endless. Who he is, is unknowable, and what he represents, a matter of perpetual disagreement. He has always given us the slip, and always will. He himself told us so while escaping from Donna Anna in his opening line of the opera, uttering words as prophetic as they are emblematic:

Chi son io, tu non saprai (Who I am, you will not know!)

© James Conlon, revised 2022

Excerpted with permission from Ravinia Magazine

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