by Glover, Jane
At her next appearance, Zerlina (who has been dragged away from Giovanni by Elvira) has to make it up to Masetto: quite understandably he is furious at having been abandoned by his bride on his wedding day. She tells him he should punish her, but then let them make peace. The text of her aria, ‘Batti, batti, o bel Masetto / La tua povera Zerlina’ (Hit your wretched Zerlina, Masetto), could have been set in an altogether angular, even violent way. But Mozart understands that this is Zerlina’s own form of seduction, and one that is quite as successful as that of Giovanni himself. It is an aria of infinitely alluring simplicity, enhanced by an obbligato solo cello; and at the end of it, Masetto too is lulled into playful submission. Then, during the party at Giovanni’s house, Zerlina is all but seduced again, but screams for help (legend has it that Mozart taught Caterina Bondini to do this by pinching her bottom). After that she sings constantly with Masetto, as if she is literally clinging to him. But she has to use all her effusive sweetness again in the second act, after Giovanni has beaten up poor Masetto. Da Ponte’s text for this scene between them is seductive, beautiful and naughty. As Masetto shows Zerlina the bruises and wounds all over his body, she observes lightly, ‘Non è gran mal, se il resto è sano’ (If the rest of you is fit, there’s no problem). Again Mozart set Da Ponte’s gloriously erotic text in an utterly beguiling manner, and the aria ‘Vedrai carino’ literally arrests the apparently unstoppable, even accelerating, flow of the main story (the fall of Don Giovanni), as the dramatic focus hovers over two ultimately less important roles. Caterina Bondini, Prague’s favourite singer, certainly had her moment of complete glory, and generations of Zerlinas have been grateful to her ever since.
In the final outcome, Zerlina and Masetto scamper off together, grateful to have survived the dramatic events they have witnessed. Anna and Elvira cannot share their relief, however: there has been gratification at the final justice of Giovanni’s end, but absolutely no satisfaction. Anna’s journey through the opera is perhaps the greater of the two, for, unlike Elvira, she starts it (before we see her) in a state of innocence. Both Da Ponte and Mozart are teasingly tight-lipped about the extent to which Anna (if at all) actually welcomed an unidentified, attractive charmer into her room at night. But whether she did and then had second thoughts, or whether she was genuinely startled by his presence, her first appearance is absolutely compelling: as Giovanni tries to run away from his failed seduction, she clutches at him, screaming, ‘I will never let you get away with this.’ She calls for help, and, when her father arrives, flees back into the house. By the time she returns with Ottavio and others, Giovanni has long gone, and she is confronted with the corpse of her murdered father. This utterly appalling moment motivates her for the rest of the opera, and it is brilliantly handled by both Da Ponte and Mozart. In inarticulate bursts of shocked accompanied recitative, Anna is almost ghoulishly fascinated by the reality of her father’s death, by the blood, and by his wound (‘Quella sangue – quella piaga’). She begins to lose her grip, and eventually collapses altogether: ‘Padre mio . . . caro padre . . . padre amato . . . io manco . . . io moro’. (And this music is even more searing in the knowledge that Mozart wrote it while coming to terms with the death of his own father.) When she recovers from her faint, railing even at poor Ottavio in her confusion, she becomes consumed with determination to avenge her father’s blood. In more accompanied recitative she makes Ottavio swear to help her, and together they sing of the crisis in which they find themselves. Both Anna and Ottavio are entirely human and credible in this scene; and Anna’s gathering obsession now to make Giovanni pay is surely coloured for her by the thought that, somehow, it is all her fault.
After Giovanni’s next thwarted seduction (that of Zerlina, interrupted by Elvira), Anna and Ottavio come upon him and – for they know him well – ask for his friendship and help on this terrible day. Relieved not to be recognized, Giovanni smoothly complies. But Elvira interrupts the proceedings again, and firmly tells Anna not to trust him (‘Non ti fidar, o misera / Di quell ribaldo cor’). Anna and Ottavio are greatly sympathetic to Elvira (‘Cieli! Che aspetto nobile! Che dolce maestà!’ – What noble bearing, what imposing sweetness!), and although Giovanni tries to tell them that Elvira is crazy (‘La povera ragazza / E pazza, amici miei’), they remain convinced that she is not (‘Non hà l’aria di pazzia’). In hesitant, disjunct and falling phrases, they begin to have grave and unwelcome misgivings. And as Elvira leaves, cleverly followed by Giovanni who feigns concern for all of them, Anna at last recognizes Giovanni’s voice, and therefore the awful truth: he was her attempted seducer, and her father’s murderer. In another brilliant scene, alternating between near-hysteria and icy resolve, she tells Ottavio exactly what happened that night, making the remarkable suggestion that she thought the man who came into her room was Ottavio himself. Mozart sets this line over a completely static string chord; and, especially in the midst of such turmoil, the doubtful veracity of this statement is quietly underlined. Anna retrieves her momentum, and launches into an enormous aria about honour and vengeance (‘Or sai che l’onore’), with wild leaps, high tessitura and aggressive word-painting as she sees again the horrific image of her father’s fatal wound. Teresa Saporiti’s dramatic and vocal skills were well exploited in this scene, which ends with a real surprise, a gentle cadence. The ambiguity of this ingenious touch of Mozart’s has challenged generations of interpreters.
At Giovanni’s party, Anna, Elvira and Ottavio, masked now as if at a Venetian Carnival celebration, work together as a team to track down Giovanni and bring him to justice. He escapes, of course; and by the second act it is clear that Anna’s composure is beginning to crack. Ottavio is perhaps being over-solicitous, inviting her to dry her tears and lean on him, but she understandably insists that she needs to grieve. When Leporello, disguised as Giovanni, is discovered with Elvira, and (in the sextet) then unmasked to reveal his true identity, to the total mystification of everyone else, Anna cannot cope at all, and rushes from the scene. Ottavio, never completely sensitive to Anna’s mood, believes that her best course would be to marry him straight away, and in their next scene together he suggests as much. She is appalled: ‘O Dei, che dite? In si tristi momenti?’ she cries (How can you ask this now?). He tells her she is cruel to him, and this really shocks her: ‘Crudele? Ah no, mio bene!’ And at last she becomes tender with him. In her aria, ‘Non mi dir’, she tries to tell him that she really does love him (‘Tu ben sai quant’io t’amo’), but that the timing is quite wrong for them to marry. Expressed in long, cantabile lines, this is Anna’s most lyrical moment. But she becomes agitated again, in an allegro moderato section, when she suggests that, perhaps one day (‘Forse un giorno’) heaven will smile upon their marriage; but as Anna’s music becomes more acrobatic, the audience is told (by Mozart) that she herself has grave doubts that such a day will ever come. Sure enough, in the epilogue after Giovanni’s dreadful end, when Ottavio tries yet again to persuade her to marry him, she begs to be given one more year in which to mourn (‘Lascia, o caro, un anno ancora’). She really does need to sort herself out.
Donna Anna began the opera therefore as the innocent daughter of the Commendatore, safely betrothed to the reliable, respectable Don Ottavio; and she ends it in a state of real fragility, traumatized, grief-stricken and lost. For Donna Elvira the journey is not so vast, but it is equally troubled, and, at its end, equally unresolved. At her own first appearance – brilliantly signalled by Giovanni himself, who interrupts his own thoughts by literally smelling the approach of a woman (‘Zitto! mi pare sentire odor di femina!’) – Mozart tells the audience that Elvira is already disturbed and damaged. ‘Ah, chi mi dice mai / Qual barbaro dov’è?’ (Who can tell me where the wretch is?), she sings, in rhythms identical to those of the first aria of Elettra in Idomeneo (‘Tutto nel cor mi sento’). And, sure enough, Elvira’s music is distracted, miserable and furious. She has short fragments of phrase, wild contrasts of dynamic, and swirling accompaniment in the strings. And she to
o is bent on results: ‘Gli vò cavare il cor’ (I want to tear his heart out). Giovanni, observing all this at a distance, fails at first to recognize her; but when he steps out of the shadows to offer her his assistance, she of course identifies him. And as she accuses him of having treated her so shamefully, she tells the audience exactly what happened to her: as was clearly his common practice, Giovanni had apparently slipped furtively into her house, given her three days of the greatest pleasure, and promised to marry her. (Casanova, sitting in the audience, may perhaps have raised his eyebrows at this point.) So now Elvira wants to get her own back, although she is not exactly clear what she means by this. Giovanni cleverly slips away, instructing Leporello to ‘tell her everything’. And he does, in his ‘Catalogue’ aria, counting out, country by country, the exact number of conquests (over 2,000, evidently) that Giovanni has made. Elvira’s resolve for vengeance is thoroughly refuelled.
At her next appearance, Elvira interrupts Giovanni’s seduction of Zerlina: she pulls the couple apart, and tells Zerlina to run away from such a traitor: ‘Ah, fuggi il traditor!’ Her brief aria (just 45 bars long) is extremely effective, set in jagged lines and dotted rhythms, completely dispelling the erotic serenity of ‘Là ci darem la mano’; and Zerlina does indeed flee. But when, in the quartet, Elvira approaches Anna and Ottavio, warning them for their part not to trust Giovanni, her tone is calm, sorrowful and dignified, and they believe her, joining forces with her to track down their prey. If Elvira’s aim was at the very least to get in Giovanni’s way, thus far she has been extremely successful.
But early in the second act there is one of the cruellest episodes in the opera. Elvira is at her window, confessing to herself that she still loves Giovanni (‘Ah taci, ingiusto core’). Giovanni and Leporello overhear this. Giovanni anyway has designs now on Elvira’s maid, and tells Leporello to pretend to be him, and lure Elvira away. As Leporello acts out the role of ventriloquist’s dummy, Giovanni sings for him what is evidently one of his little serenades of seduction (for ‘Discendi, o gioia bella’ will become ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ when he sings it to the maid). And poor Elvira falls for it. This is at once one of the most glorious and the most disturbing moments in the entire opera. Dramatically it is heartless: Elvira is being horribly and humiliatingly tricked, Giovanni is ruthlessly exploiting her vulnerability, Leporello is sniggering in the background; and the music is of heartstopping beauty. Mozart seems to be delivering the scene from Elvira’s point of view, as her private melancholia gives way to tentative excitement when she hears Giovanni’s honeyed tones. And yet the presence of the two men, the layers therefore of dramatic complexity, and the whole thrust of narrative and pace give the scene tremendous depth and clarity. As an encapsulation of the combined brilliance of Mozart and Da Ponte, there is no finer nor more succinct example.
The cruelty of Leporello’s disguise as Giovanni continues in the recitative, as Leporello now begins to enjoy himself; and he succeeds in getting Elvira away. We meet them next in a dark courtyard, at the beginning of the sextet. Elvira is frightened of the dark, and fearful too of being left alone there, and her heart palpitations are heard in her music. When Leporello is cornered by Anna, Ottavio, Zerlina and Masetto, she leaps to his defence – ‘E mio marito, pietà’ (Have mercy on my husband). But as Leporello removes his disguise and begs forgiveness, she, like the others, is stunned almost into speechlessness: ‘Deh! Leporello?’ they gasp, ‘Che inganno è questo?’ (What on earth is going on?), and they all join together for a truly turbulent fugue of swirling, angry, brilliant counterpoint, ‘Mille turbidi pensieri’. After Leporello’s flight, Elvira remains silent (in that first Prague version), leaving Ottavio to try to take charge of the situation. She appears again briefly in the supper scene, begging Giovanni now to change his ways; but her pleas meet only with derision. She can do no more, and rushes from the room, passing as she goes the terrifying spectacle of the statue of the Commendatore, whose supernatural presence will shortly achieve what the combined efforts of the earthly avengers could not. And when it is all over, and the exhausted survivors draw breath and survey their futures, Elvira announces her intention to enter a convent. Her life in the outside world has been ruined.
News of the success of Don Giovanni spread fast, and in Vienna Joseph II immediately requested a production there. (By the time it happened, in May 1788, the Emperor was on the battlefield fighting the Turks, and missed the whole event.) Vienna could certainly produce a cast as gifted as that in Prague. There were only two newcomers to Mozart: Don Giovanni would be sung by Francesco Albertarelli, a young baritone who would make his Viennese debut in the Salieri–Da Ponte Axur, one month before Don Giovanni; and Don Ottavio by Francesco Morella, whose own debut was as Almaviva in the Paisiello Il barbiere di Siviglia in the same season. But the rest of the cast were old friends. The two Francescos were back: Benucci as Leporello, and Bussani as the Commendatore and Masetto. And the three women were Mozart’s Countess, Luisa Laschi, as Zerlina; and, as Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, Caterina Cavalieri and Aloysia Lange, together again for the first time since Der Schauspieldirektor. It was a truly stellar cast.
Given these different singers – and a different audience too – Mozart and Da Ponte did make some changes to the opera. They omitted the Epilogue altogether, preferring to give their Viennese public the spectacular conflagration of Don Giovanni’s end as a final image, rather than pull the focus back on to the more rational (albeit generally unhappy) remaining characters. (This shortened version was to be preferred throughout the nineteenth century.) Other changes involved specific singers. Clearly Francesco Morella did not have the vocal flexibility of Antonio Baglioni, and could not cope with the demands of ‘Il mio tesoro’, so Mozart wrote him the slow, lyrical and sweet ‘Dalla sua pace’. But this did not substitute for ‘Il mio tesoro’: Mozart and Da Ponte put it in the first act, and rewrote completely what happened after the sextet in Act II. In the Vienna version, Leporello did not make his escape, but was seized by Zerlina, tied to a chair and threatened with a razor. It is a not unsuccessful scene, deriving perhaps from that for Blonde and Osmin in Die Entführung, and both Mozart and Da Ponte gave it richness yet levity. The Viennese audiences therefore had a lacuna of rough hilarity amidst the darkness of the second act, and Benucci and Laschi too were given a presumably welcome opportunity to display their own combined comedic skills.
But the biggest change for Vienna was what immediately followed the Zerlina–Leporello scene: Caterina Cavalieri, as Elvira, got a new soliloquy. (Perhaps she was aware of just how much extremely exposed music there was for Aloysia Lange as Anna, and their old rivalry still obtained.) And, as in the soliloquy for the Countess in the second half of Figaro, Elvira has a recitative and aria of real, private soul-baring, and it shows her in an altogether new light. Having just been utterly humiliated, discovered with Don Giovanni’s servant while believing him to be the man himself, she seems to be in total despair, agonizing about ‘excesses’ and ‘horrible enormities’. But the shock of this recitative is that she is not expressing self-pity, but concern for Giovanni. It is for the safety of his soul that she fears. And in her aria (‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’ – The wretched man betrayed me) she spells out the truth: although she has been appallingly treated by Giovanni, she only has to look upon his face (‘ma se guardo il suo cimento’) and she is utterly aroused: she still loves him. The real turbulence of this realization is expressed in jagged virtuosity (that Cavalieri speciality), word fragmentations and phenomenally unexpected harmonic and melodic progressions. As ever, Mozart has seized on Cavalieri’s remarkable musicianship and technical expertise, and deployed them in such a way as to give real insight into Elvira’s character and situation. But the big difference between her soliloquy and that for the Countess in Figaro is that, where the Countess had a healing change of heart and ended her scene in radiant optimism, poor Elvira’s self-revelation only confines her all the more to her bleak hopelessness.
WHEN T
HIS VIENNESE Don Giovanni was mounted in May 1788, Aloysia, as Donna Anna, was five months pregnant with her sixth child. But she was not the only cast member in that state: Luisa Laschi (Zerlina) was in her seventh month, and in due course she had to leave the production. (Her first child, born the previous year, had died almost immediately, and she was probably anxious for her second – sadly, this one also died.) Laschi was replaced by a new arrival in Vienna, the slightly older Adriana Gabrielli.
Originally from Ferrara (and therefore often labelled ‘La Ferrarese’), Gabrielli had studied as a young girl at the Conservatorio dei Mendicanti in Venice, where Burney had heard her in 1770 and been greatly impressed by her ‘very extraordinary compass of voice, as she was able to reach the highest E of our harpsichords, upon which she could dwell a considerable time, in a fair, natural voice’. She ran away from the Conservatory, and was briefly married to one Luigi del Bene, the son of a papal ambassador in Venice, with the result that throughout her career her name appeared in a confusing number of manifestations, severally Adriana Gabrielli, Adriana del Bene, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, and so on. In the 1780s she appeared in London, at the King’s Theatre, and then later in Milan and Trieste. She arrived in Vienna early in 1788, was cast as Diana in Martin y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana (to a Da Ponte libretto), and became an overnight sensation. She also became Da Ponte’s mistress, and, especially after her substitution as Zerlina, an important member of the Mozart–Da Ponte circle.