by Glover, Jane
At the start of her scene, the Countess is nervously awaiting news from Susanna as to whether or not the Count has fallen for their ruse. She is impatient and anxious, and her tension turns to fear of her hotheaded and jealous husband. She tries to calm herself down: ‘Ma che mal c’è?’ (But what harm are we doing?). But as she runs through the whole plan again, that she must change clothes with Susanna, under cover of darkness, she suddenly breaks. ‘O cielo! A qual umil stato fatale io son ridotta da un consorte crudel’ (To what humiliation have I been reduced by a cruel husband); and in her despair she charts the dissolution of her marriage:
. . . che dopo avermi
Con un misto inaudito
D’infedeltà, di gelosie, di sdegni,
Prima amata, indi offesa, e alfin tradita.
In a strange mixture of infidelity,
jealousy and disdain,
first he loved me, then neglected
and finally deceived me.
And she arrives at her cruellest punchline:
Fammi or cercar da una mia serva aita.
Now he forces me to seek help from my own servant.
This ‘servant’ is Susanna: her friend, her devoted supporter. But at this moment of utter desolation, the Countess can see her only as an underling, to whom begging for help constitutes the worst social solecism. Truly, this Countess has only one foot in the burgeoning new world of egalitarianism; the other is still planted firmly in the ancien régime.
All these kaleidoscopic changes of emotion, swirling and conflicting in the Countess’s mind, are of course expressed by Mozart in his matchless accompanied recitative, every nuance and subtlety mirrored and illuminated by the orchestra too. Having reached her nadir, the Countess moves into the most affecting aria of heartrending nostalgia: ‘Dove sono i bei momenti di dolcezza e di piacer?’ (What happened to the pleasures and delights of my marriage?). As she remembers the good times, a shadowy oboe (Mozart’s instrument of seduction) completes her lines for her, recalling lost happiness. There is no virtuosity here, but simple, grieving beauty. Then as she returns to her opening, in what seems to be a regular da capo aria, a new thought strikes her:
Ah! Se almen la mia costanza
Nel languire amando ognor
Mi portasse una speranza
Di cangiar l’ingrato cor!
Ah! If only my constancy
in always yearning for him
could bring me the hope
of changing his ungrateful heart!
And this tiny glimpse of optimism, cautiously expressed at first, grows into an allegro section and a new, positive spirit of energy and excitement. She ends her aria, and her scene, in triumph, stronger, more determined and in some way healed. For the rest of the opera, up to and beyond her calm forgiveness of the Count, she is in control. And it was Mozart’s fundamental generosity and philanthropy (for Da Ponte’s text could have been interpreted in an altogether different way) that allowed his Countess her wonderful change of heart.
The mould was indeed broken. For all the stirring portrayals of character in the works of Mozart’s predecessors and contemporaries, even indeed in his own operas, nothing before had ever discovered such astonishing depths of veracity. Between them, Mozart and Da Ponte had finally held the mirror up to the audience: ‘This,’ they were saying, ‘is all about you.’
AFTER FIGARO’S SUCCESSFUL run of performances in Vienna, word travelled, and within six months of that May premiere, a new production was mounted in Prague. Here, an Italian bass-turned-impresario, Pasquale Bondini, was the director of Prague’s National Theatre. He was a great enthusiast for Mozart’s music, and had already presented Die Entführung twice, in Leipzig in 1783 and in Dresden in 1785. He moved swiftly to bring Figaro to Prague, taking particular delight in the fact that this new Mozart opera would provide his young wife Caterina, an extremely popular and accomplished member of his company, with the wonderful role of Susanna.
Figaro was an immediate triumph in Prague and Bondini invited Mozart and Constanze to come and see it, in January 1787. They came; Wolfgang directed some performances of it, and he was well pleased with what he found: the cast was more than equal to the challenges of his score. Bondini, meanwhile, was planning ahead. In the coming October, the Emperor’s niece, Maria Theresa, would visit Prague on the occasion of her marriage to Prince Anton Clemens of Saxony. Joseph would need something special to present to their Highnesses, and a new opera by Mozart would be ideal. Bondini asked for a version of the Don Juan story – probably because the greatest star of his company was the young Luigi Bassi, a man with a magnificent voice, charismatic stage presence, and extremely good looks. (Beethoven later described him as a ‘fiery Italian’.) Bassi had performed the Count in the Prague production of Figaro, so Mozart too had appreciated his great talent. Wolfgang was delighted to accept this new commission, to celebrate an august occasion in a civilized city with impressive musical and theatrical talent; and on his return to Vienna he naturally asked Da Ponte to join him on the project.
As it happened, Da Ponte was already heavily committed, working on two librettos, Tarare (for Salieri) and L’arbore di Diana (for Martin y Soler), both of which were required imminently. Producing something for Mozart, for performance in nine months’ time, was a tall order. But he too was greatly attracted by the occasion, and he was strongly drawn to the subject-matter (that Venetian friendship with Casanova was now about to pay dividends). With Wolfgang’s enthusiastic advocacy for the Prague team, and Da Ponte’s own knowledgeable sympathy with the hero, he found the project irresistible. And to help him through a pressurized period of meeting three deadlines at once, Da Ponte devised wholly appropriate ways of keeping himself alert and inspired:
I sat down at my table and did not leave it for twelve hours continuous – a bottle of Tokay to my right, a box of Seville to my left, in the middle an inkwell. A beautiful girl of sixteen – I should have preferred to love her only as a daughter, but alas . . . ! – was living in the house with her mother, who took care of the family, and came to my room at the sound of the bell. To tell the truth the bell rang rather frequently, especially at moments when I felt my inspiration waning.55
For all that Don Giovanni, the new opera by Mozart and Da Ponte, was to be described on its title pages as a dramma giocoso, this was a very dark reading of the popular story. Da Ponte based his own version on one given in Venice, earlier in 1787, when Bertati had prepared a libretto for Gazzaniga. It would describe the final day in the life of the celebrated seducer of women. As Don Giovanni is trying to add young Donna Anna to his list of conquests, her father the Commendatore comes to her rescue: they fight, and the Commendatore is killed. Unabashed, Giovanni, accompanied by his servant Leporello, continues his pursuit of other women, next trying to seize a young peasant girl, Zerlina, on her wedding day (a development, certainly, of a theme begun by the Count and Susanna in Figaro). But Donna Anna, together with the man to whom she is betrothed, Don Ottavio, and Donna Elvira, a miserable reject from Don Giovanni’s pile of past (and passing) conquests, doggedly pursue Giovanni, determined to put an end to his reckless and harmful philandering. When in a graveyard at night Giovanni and Leporello come upon the statue of the late Commendatore, the fearless Giovanni invites it to join him for supper. The statue does indeed appear at his table, demanding that Giovanni repent his ways; and when Giovanni refuses, he is consumed by hellfire. The lives of all those involved in Giovanni’s last day (Leporello, Anna, Elvira, Ottavio, Zerlina and her husband Masetto) continue. But they have all been irrevocably changed by their encounter with Don Giovanni, and by the trauma of his dramatic end.
Despite the greatly more melodramatic nature of Don Giovanni, beginning and ending as it does with violent death, and portraying during its course other unspeakable horrors, there are many similarities of theme, and of device, to those of Figaro. First, young Cherubino’s infatuation with women, seen essentially in adolescent fumblings but expressed in music of poignant appeal, has in Don Gi
ovanni himself become something brutal, though no less charming, in adulthood. ‘Le donne!’ says Giovanni to Leporello, ‘Sai ch’elle per me son necessarie più del pan che mango, più che l’aria che spiro’ (Women are more vital to me than the bread that I eat or the air that I breathe). Da Ponte’s portrayal of this grown-up obsession seems to have been partly based on his observation of his friend Casanova, who did in the course of seduction promise marriage to many women, but then vanished after achieving his conquest. Yet the irresistible allure of the music that Mozart wrote for Giovanni succeeds in seducing the audience too, making him a genuinely attractive character, just as he had with Cherubino’s naive but potentially tiresome teenager. And then the notion of retribution, so suavely achieved in Figaro, is developed here in Don Giovanni to literally cataclysmic proportions, partly through the development too of the dramatic devices of disguise and darkness, exacerbated now by the sheer quantity of grievances levelled at the offender. And where in Figaro the very revolutionary nature of the subject-matter yielded some rich insights into class-consciousness, and into the human injustices of social hierarchies, these are continued in Don Giovanni: Leporello and Masetto both retain the anger of Figaro, and Zerlina the essential servility of Susanna. Again in the final outcome, the greatest optimism for the future resides in the representatives of the lower orders, in Figaro in the marriage between Susanna and Figaro, and their fundamental decency and happiness; and in Don Giovanni, amidst the scattered wreckage of so many lives, in the union between Zerlina and Masetto, and perhaps too in Leporello’s dogged abilities to survive. As before, Da Ponte’s libretto is bejewelled with lines of a quite remarkable richness, and Mozart never failed to honour them with music of matching understanding.
Mozart and Constanze arrived back in Prague at the beginning of October 1787, with most of the opera written: Wolfgang did after all know all but one of the voices for whom he was writing. Da Ponte followed them a week later. Given that the royal performance of this new work was scheduled for 14 October, it is not in the least surprising that it was nowhere near ready within such a short time: quite apart from the singers having to learn and absorb all this new music, and rehearse a complex and lengthy production, they were at the same time performing in other operas, and so their availability for rehearsal was even more restricted. Emergency measures were taken. The premiere of Don Giovanni was postponed for ten days, and the Imperial couple were entertained instead with a hastily remounted performance of Figaro. It was hardly an appropriate choice of subject for the newly-weds, who not surprisingly walked out of the theatre before the end of the opera. The following day they left Prague altogether, thus missing completely the work that had been devised for their delight. More serious perhaps, from Mozart’s point of view, was that Da Ponte had to leave too: Salieri (and their Tarare, now renamed Axur) required his immediate presence in Vienna. When one of the Don Giovanni cast became ill, the premiere had to be postponed yet again; and it was not until 29 October that the work was at last presented, sadly without half of its creative team, mercifully perhaps without its intended dedicatees (if Figaro was an unsuitable wedding present, Don Giovanni was even more preposterous), but, thrillingly, in the presence of none other than Casanova, who had travelled to Prague expressly to see it.
Despite all the crises and changes of plan, Mozart was obviously in good spirits. He and Constanze spent time with their great friends the Duscheks in their Villa Bertramka, just outside Prague; and Josefa Duschek persuaded Wolfgang to write her a new concert aria, locking him in his room until he had finished it. He responded by insisting that she then sightread it, and made sure that he wrote some fiendishly difficult and unconventional intervals in ‘Bella mia fiamma’, K528.
As always with Mozart’s ‘tailor-made’ operas, the music that he wrote in Don Giovanni is greatly indicative of the quality of his cast. He already knew the raw, erotic energy of ‘fiery’ Luigi Bassi, who had played the Count, and he drew extensively on it for his Don Giovanni, as he did on Bassi’s great gifts as an actor and a mimic. Bassi did however complain to Mozart that, of his two arias, one (‘Fin ch’han dal vino’) was almost manically driven, and the other (‘Metà de voi’) was more concerned with plot than with singing, and that therefore he would like an opportunity to show off his ability to spin a lyrical line. So Mozart wrote him the sublime serenade, ‘Deh, vieni alla finistra’, and Bassi was satisfied. Felice Panziani had sung Figaro, and was especially known for his comedy and for his great ability with text; so he now became Leporello, a richly rewarding role, blessed with one of the most famous of all arias, the ‘Catalogue’ of Giovanni’s lovers that he mercilessly enumerates for poor Elvira. The bass Giuseppe Lolli doubled the roles of the Commendatore and Masetto, as he probably had those of Bartolo and Antonio in Figaro. Only the tenor Antonio Baglioni was new to Mozart, as he was to Bondini’s company, and most of his music, including his (at that point) one aria, was written after the Mozarts had arrived in Prague. But, as that aria (‘Il mio tesoro’) shows, he was a singer of grace, stamina and good coloratura; and he would reappear importantly later in Mozart’s life.
The three women, headed by the boss’s wife Caterina Bondini as Zerlina, were all remarkable singers. Donna Elvira was sung by Caterina Micelli (who had most probably played Cherubino); and Donna Anna was Teresa Saporiti, who had joined Bondini’s company at the age of nineteen, and sung for him in Dresden and Leipzig as well as Prague (where almost certainly she would have sung the Countess). She had a reputation for good looks, a highly-strung temperament and a radiant voice, and Mozart was to deploy all these avidly. (She must also have enjoyed remarkably good health, for she apparently lived to the age of 106.)
Clearly, Mozart was energized by the qualities of his singers, as he was by his continuing collaboration with Da Ponte, by his great popularity in Prague, and by the richness of the subject-matter. Perhaps, too, the rawness of his emotions after the death of his father, in May 1787, in some profound way contributed to yet another level of originality in Don Giovanni. There was major audacity and musical innovation, the most breathtaking being the use of three on-stage bands, in addition to the orchestra in the pit, playing different music in different time-signatures at the same time, in the finale to Act I. At the wedding party he throws for Zerlina and Masetto, Giovanni lays on all manner of activities, including three different dances, in order to draw attention from his designs on the bride herself. The very complexity of this had been set up in Giovanni’s ‘Champagne’ aria:
Fin ch’han dal vino
Calda la testa,
Una gran festa
Fà preparar.
Now that the wine
has set their heads on fire,
go and prepare
a great party.
He had continued:
Senza alcun ordine
La danza sia;
Ch’il minuetto,
Chi la follia,
Chi l’alemana
Farai ballar.
Let the dancing
be completely wild:
They can do a minuet
or a gavotte
or a jig.
And this is exactly what Mozart wrote in the party scene. But while, to all intents and purposes, the music seems to be ‘senza alcun ordine’, with three different stage bands tuning up and playing across one another, it is in fact of extremely sophisticated organization, the different layers fitting neatly together. (Like so many passages in Mozart’s letters, this appears to be nonsense but in fact makes perfect sense.) He had once said that hearing much different music at the same time gave him ‘plenty of ideas’, and here is his quite phenomenal and seemingly effortless ability to reproduce them all at once. In the final scene of the opera, when Giovanni is calmly eating his supper before the arrival of Elvira and then the statue of the Commendatore, Mozart could not resist using a stage band again, as, clearly following custom, Giovanni’s meal was accompanied by tunes from popular shows. With a gleeful touch, Mozart qu
oted from Martin y Soler’s Una cosa rara, Sarti’s I due litiganti, and, hilariously, from his own Figaro. (These quotations would have been even funnier at later performances in Vienna, but would have made their mark too with the well-versed Prague audiences.) And at Don Giovanni’s final damnation, Mozart used again a device he had first deployed to enormous effect during the storm scene in Idomeneo, and wrote for an off-stage chorus. The addition here of unseen and unworldly voices, together with trombones (instruments traditionally associated with church music, and suggestive therefore of divine retribution), adds immeasurably to the impact of the moment, and to its enduring terror.
But, as always, it is in the musical characterization that Mozart overwhelmingly excels, and in Don Giovanni nowhere more than in his portrayal of the three women. Zerlina, as sung by Caterina Bondini, would probably have been considered the ‘prima’ donna, and seems to represent pure sexuality, the most irresistible bait for Giovanni himself. From her first appearance, with Masetto and her fellow country folk on her wedding day (‘Giovinetti, che fate a l’amore’), her music is appropriately peasant-like, with uneven, 7-bar phrases in a rustic 6/8 metre. (This contrasts sharply with the aristocratic dignity – however unstable – of the music for Anna and Elvira.) But when Zerlina is seduced by Giovanni, he makes something lyrical and elegant of her. Even in the simple recitative preceding their famous duet, Mozart gave Giovanni hypnotically repetitive vocal patterns as he enumerated Zerlina’s attractions – her eyes, her lips, her fingers (‘quegli occhi briconcelli, quei labretti si belli, quelle dituccie candide e odorose’). The duet itself, ‘Là ci darem la mano’, is in A major, like that for the Count and Susanna (which of course Bassi and Bondini had sung together), and at first she tries to resist him (‘Vorrei e non vorrei’ – I want it, and yet I don’t want it). But her resolve melts completely, in a chromatically descending collapse (‘non son più forte’ – I haven’t the strength) as Giovanni strokes her into submission. At just the right moment, he leads her into a gentle 6/8 (her own metre) for ‘Andiam, andiam, mio bene’ (Let’s go, darling), and she joins him, willingly and finally ecstatically. The duet has become one of the most alluring in the entire operatic repertoire, and says as much about the theatrical chemistry between Bondini and Bassi as it does about Mozart’s own understanding of gentle conquest.