The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Front matter

= ba x e= ein = et 1A

THE ORIGINAL PORTRAYAL

OF MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI Magnus Tessing Schneider

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface x Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1

Rewriting the myth of Don Juan 1 The demonising of Don Giovanni: a historical overview 5 Notes 12

1 Luigi Bassi as Don Giovanni 15 The singer and his role 15 Intention and experience: prescriptive and descriptive sources 18 The performer as a phenomenon 27 Grace and gallantry: Bassi’s portrayal 33 Performance traditions: Italians and Germans 36

Preface

Is the title character of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787) a charming, non-violent seducer, or is he a ruthless, arrogant rapist and murderer? Even asking that question may seem controversial at a time when stage productions and critical commentaries almost invariably depict him as the latter. But as this book will show, it is important to ask the question. In fact, there is ample evidence that Don Giovanni was not portrayed as arrogant and violent on stage originally, just as Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto hardly supports such a reading. But that just raises another question: how did the violent, or demonic, image of Don Giovanni then come to dominate? The present book tries to answer both questions; drawing on a variety of humanistic disciplines, from the histories of theatre, music, literature and art to translation studies, cultural history and philosophical aesthetics, it tries to recapture the original scenic portrayal of the character while also trying to show when, how and why that interpretation was forgotten. Ultimately, this raises other questions, about the transmission of stage works, the role of cultural myths and the social functions of the arts, both today and in the past.

Don Giovanni has been an integral part of my life since I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Aarhus University (Schneider 2008). While the present monograph has grown out of that early work, my interpretation of the opera has matured considerably in the meantime. Back then, I was so thrilled to have realised that historical sources referring to the portrayal of the title role by Luigi Bassi, the singer for whom it was written, were at variance with today’s standard representation of the character that I was convinced, naively, that everyone would share my enthusiasm as soon as I had explained to them how everything fitted together. But the examiners of my thesis were not persuaded by my interpretation, and so I came to realise that the work I had done was only a draft. Neither my source criticism nor my poetic close readings had been careful enough, and it became clear to me that in order to challenge, in a fundamental way, the generally accepted interpretation of a classic of such overwhelmingly iconic status as Don Giovanni, it is not enough to present a meticulous, historically contextualised counterinterpretation; it is also necessary to show how the standard interpretation emerged.

In 2009, the year of my PhD defence, I wrote an article on the champagne aria for the Danish Yearbook of Musicology, which was based on my thesis (Schneider 2009), and in the summer I presented my research at a Mozart conference in

Preface xi

Prague (for my contribution to the proceedings, see Schneider 2016). Here I came into contact with the Don Giovanni scholar Hans Ernst Weidinger, founder of the Don Juan Archiv Wien, who encouraged and generously supported my work during the following years. I use this opportunity to thank him warmly. I can truly say that Don Giovanni, so often accused of breaking social bonds, has played the opposite role in my career, often forging connections with scholars and performers all over the world. Felicity Baker, another eminent Don Giovanni scholar, entered my life in connection with a small conference that I helped organise in Stockholm in 2010. She became my academic mentor, and I regard our conversations and her multiple and invaluable letters, bristling with wisdom and immense knowledge of the eighteenth century, and often revolving around the interpretation of Mozart’s opera, as a crucial part both of my education as a scholar and of my formation as a humanist. By helping her publish her collected essays on Da Ponte, I hope to pay some of the debt I owe her: Don Giovanni’s Reasons: Thoughts on a masterpiece will appear with Peter Lang more or less simultaneously with the publication of the present monograph, and I regard the two books as complementary, revisiting the opera from a literary and a theatrical perspective, respectively.

In 2013 I joined the research group Performing Premodernity based at Stockholm University, led by conductor Mark Tatlow and the theatre scholars Willmar Sauter and Meike Wagner who, together with my (now former) PhD students Maria Gullstam and Petra Dotlacilova, provided me with invaluable encouragement and feedback on various drafts for this book, which is dedicated to them. In particular, I would like to thank Mark for bringing the perspective of an experienced Mozart conductor to the study of Don Giovanni. Together, we have not only examined all extant arias written for Luigi Bassi by other composers than Mozart, the results of our efforts soon appearing in the volume Arias for Luigi Bassi, Mozart’s First Don Giovanni (A-R Editions); we have also gone through the much-discussed metronome numbers for Don Giovanni recorded by Wenzel Johann Tomaschek in 1839, which enhanced my understanding of the intimate connection between musical tempo and expression.

After moving to Stockholm, I have spoken on Don Giovanni at a few conferences, and a paper on Don Giovanni and Kierkegaard was turned into an article (Schneider 2018a). The most instructive experience was when I presented an admittedly provocative paper on Donna Anna at a conference in the summer of 2017, a few months before the rise of the #MeToo movement in the United States. While the majority of the (mainly Swedish) audience received my interpretation and my historical findings very positively, some American scholars reacted very negatively, and I was struck by the way the reactions seemed to divide along national lines. This experience stimulated my interest in the differences between Continental hermeneutics and American pragmatism, between phenomenology and ethical criticism, between the view of art as an autonomous space for the free play of the imagination and the view of art as a form of pedagogical community-building that negotiates the values of the audience — differences I will discuss in the postscript. While the #MeToo movement has spurred me to rethink some of my arguments, I still believe, like Felicity Baker, that a production of Don Giovanni xii Preface that refrains from portraying the title hero as the stereotypical violent predator has more to offer today’s audiences than one that doesn’t. Besides, that was also how the role was portrayed originally.

In addition to the people mentioned above, I would like to thank Christine Jeanneret, Ferdinando Maffii, Martin Nedbal, Alan Swanson, Ruth Tatlow, Nicola Usula, Andreas Wahlberg, Ian Woodfield and the anonymous Routledge reviewer of my book proposal for providing me with most valuable comments after reading all or parts of the manuscript in different states of completion. I would also like to thank Elaine Sisman for sharing her important manuscript papers on Don Giovanni with me in advance of publication, and Henrik Engelbrecht for generously allowing me to reproduce the two Marstrand drawings in his collection.

Stockholm, April 2021

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible thanks to two generous grants, from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences and from the Swedish Research Council. It is published with open online access thanks to a further grant from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com