326 - Don Giovanni: Seducer or Blasphemer?

Don Giovanni: Seducer or Blasphemer?

By Samuel Terrien

The bicentennial of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni¹offers the: occasion to explore what has usually been ignored, namely, its; theological overtones.

Music critics have thoroughly discussed the Da Ponte libretto, while musicologists, for the most part, have been content to extol the technical virtuosity of the score, but few Mozartians have asked the elusive question: what did the music confer upon the text that words alone could not convey? Might it have been an amplitude of fulgurance which called for religious reflection beyond the obviously ethical aspects of the drama?

Mozart's genius, at once playful and tragic, brought to the Don Juan legend the quality of a cosmic myth. Not unlike the Edenic Adam and Eve, who wish to ape divinity, Prometheus, who snatches heavenly fire for humankind, or Job, who accuses the deity of sadistic caprice, Don Giovanni paradoxically both denies and defies God.

I

The original Don Juan Tenorio, portrayed by the monk Tirso de Molina in his play El burlador de Sevilla y el convidado de piedra (1630), was a "trickster" of tall tale and Gargantuan lore. He was reputed to have seduced and abandoned in Spain alone mille e tre (a. thousand and three) women, in addition to hundreds of others in Italy,, France, Germany, and even Turkey.

Far more than a merely vulgar seducer, Mozart's Don Giovanni is The Blasphemer. He challenges life at the risk of his eternal destiny. Having expelled transcendence from the universe, he is compelled to confront the Void in the stars and in the human heart.

Among the scores of plays and novels on the Don Juan legend written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only one or two hinted at its theological dimensions. Italian churches staged a theatrical sketch called Atheismo Fulmato as part of Sunday devotions. It simply pointed to the inevitability of divine punishment. In Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (1665), Moliére went a step farther when he gave to Sganarelle. the Spanish grandee's servant, the phrase, "Voilá de mes esprits forts qui

Samuel Terrien is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of numerous works, including The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology (1978) and Till The Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (1985). His earlier article on Mozart, "Amadeus Revisited," appeared in the January 1986 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

¹Prague, 1787; Vienna, 1788. The opera met with immediate success in the Bohemian capital but was coolly received in the Austrian court. Through the support of the emperor Joseph II, however, it was performed many times in Vienna from May to December 1788.

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ne veulent croire A rien" (Here is one of those arrogant wits who wilfully believe in nothing). Da Ponte, who was, incidentally, a friend of the Abbé Casanova, was profoundly influenced by Moliér's comedy, but he apparently meant to write chiefly a libidinous bouffonerie. Significantly, Casanova is said to have seen the Prague premiére in Da Ponte's company.

It was the music of Mozart that raised Don Giovanni from the level of morality to the sphere of theology. To be sure, the composer did not repudiate the genre of opera buffa. Impishly-and also strategically he catered to the taste of his prospective audiences to capture their interest with several instances of grossly comical imbroglio. Nevertheless he dared to depart from the strict operatic tradition by mixing boldly the genres of opera buffa and opera seria in almost every aria, duet, quartet, and orchestral accompaniment with a sudden shift from major to minor mode, some unexpected note or rhythm which at once darkens the frivolity of the melodies.

In so doing, Mozart has made the hero's "lightness of being" almost unbearable at times for the listener. Yet, he interspersed the theme of crime and punishment with insinuations of divine grace. Don Giovanni's illusory attempt to seize the Absolute by his incredible excesses, in total oblivion of human regard for his sexual partners, unexpectedly becomes, through music, the basis for a new depiction of the damned. It also produces upon hearers, taken unawares, a new form of Aristotelian catharsis.

II

Unlike previous conceptions of the Don Juan legend, Don Giovanni's duel with the aged Commendatore, who had to avenge the honor of his daughter, Donna Anna, occurs in the initial scene of the opera. The seducer is also a murderer, and the theme of death dominates the entire action.

The Overture to Act I of the opera (Act II has none) sets at once, with the first sounds of brass and strings, an ominous atmosphere, incipient with horror.² Dissonant chords in D minor are repeated, separated by raw silence. They prolong a horizontality that creates inexorable suspense. A slow rhythm accelerates into scanned steps. Three ascending and descending scales, arpeggio-like, evoke a growing intensity of erotic passion, forever frustrated. At the same time, the continuation of the motif suggests an obstinate determination, even in despair. A series of very high and swift notes by the violins usher in moments of levity, but the gaiety which sparkles again and again throughout Act I, and most of Act II, is eventually snuffed out in the drama's grand finale.

²For a musical analysis and psychological interpretation of the opera, see inter alia Pierre-Jean Jouve, Le Don Juan de Mozart (Fribourg: Egloff, 1944); René Dumesnil, Le Don Juan de Mozart: Don Giovanni (Paris, 1955); Edward J. Dent, Mozart's Operas: A Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 116-187; Ellen H. Bleiler, Don Giovanni, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (New York: Dover, 1964).

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Pleasure and irresponsibility give way to anguish. The ghost of the Commendatore, invited to the Feast with cruel defiance by Dori Giovanni, summons him, in turn, by name toward the infernal regions. While the words are not yet used, the sharp notes employed in the Overture anticipate those of the fateful call at the climax of the opera toward the end of Act II.

Clouds of heavy storm prepare, however, a lament of commiseration for the monstrous giant as he falls, but a zephyr of subtle delight follows at once. Criminal without a sense of sin, the nobleman from Seville, on Mozart's musical urgings, excites our pity far more than our contempt and certainly no Schadenfreude.

Without human voice, without words, melodic harmonies of woodwinds, flutes, and strings enchant us against a moral sense, that may be chiefly the result of our feelings of righteous superiority. Mozart teases us with a cruelty that is not devoid of charm. For an instant, we cannot condemn the Don. Even before the grand tenor, elegantly attired in black and gold, insolently struts on stage, we, too, are seduced in spite of our knowledge of his crimes.

III

Some listeners might complain that Mozart's artistry is impaired and even stained by a touch of perverse playfulness, since the enchantment of his music leads us to blur ethical distinctions and to venture, A la Nietzsche, "beyond good and evil." We should refrain from such a judgment, however, for the ambivalence displayed by the composer toward his hero unveils, little by little in the course of the drama, a design that includes far more than the psychology of moral corruption.

This ambivalence is revealed in Donna Anna's singing Come furia disperata. As early as 1813, E. T. A. Hoffmann irritated the admirers of Mozart, male as well as female, by asserting that Donna Anna was "a Superwoman" paralleled to Don Giovanni, "the Superman," because she was consumed "by an earthly passion for him."³ She desired at once the destruction of her seducer and the satisfaction of her longings for him. Beyond the text of the libretto, the music indicates that the woman had been raped, but the trio of horizontal voices that depicts her humiliation and anger gradually evolves into an elegy of the deepest sorrow over the brutal demise of her father. Even the murderer's Sento l'anima partir is more heart-rending than her mourning lament.

This initial evocation of an unjust and unwarranted killing is renewed throughout the opera. Mozart was obsessed by the scandal of mortality. Yet, he molded his Angst over human finitude into a tender image reminiscent of St. Francis of Assisi welcoming Sister Death. Many of his compositions imply such a temperamental trait years before his last months and the searing accents of his Requiem, which, for example, diluted the Dies Irae within the Pie Jesu and the Lacrymae.

³E. T. A. Hoffmann, Don Juan, eine fabelhaftige Begabenheit, cited in Dent, op. cit., p. 181.

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In Donna Anna's aria and the subsequent movements, Mozart was able to transform the vehemence of the reaction to the sexual outrage into a filial pain over bereavement and to transform revulsion for the horror of death into a lyrical sublimation of erotic love because he could enter the strange realm of the intertwining of self-giving emotion and self-serving sensation that may be called the erös-agapé continuum.

Even more than Donna Anna, Donna Elvira of Burgos and the innocent peasant girl, Zerlina, represent a wide variety of psychological types and social status. All fall prey to the contrary impulses of love and hate toward their abductor.

Tirso de Molina, in his other plays, had preferred to set up female characters as demasiado sensuales y libidinosas, while Da Ponte's libretto remained vague concerning the inner motivations of the Anna-Elvira-Zerlina trio. Mozart used several musical devices to indicate that jilted women, in their deepest hearts and against their legitimate revulsion and hurt, reserved for their tormentor a yearning and an almost forgiving devotion.

His intention should not be construed as vitiated by misogyny. Rather, he was slowly building level upon level of innuendo in order to exploit the irresistible attraction of the hero for introducing his ultimate theme.

IV

From the first instant of meeting the noble Don, Zerlina is mesmerized. His aria Fin ch'han dal vino, perhaps the most famous of the whole opera, is softly accompanied by entrancing flute and violin melodies. This instrumental combination, favored many times elsewhere by Mozart, not only supports the tenor voice but also tempers the demonic element with an ethereal angelic quality. By excessive repetition of the musical phrases, Mozart insists not only on the frenzied intensification of desire but also on the haunting search for eternity. He certainly knew that the aria would cast a spell upon the audience. He clearly wants us to feel that the obsessive quest for pleasure usually covers up the repression of mortal dread. Don Giovanni becomes no longer the hero of a gross legend but the incarnation of the most elemental human myth. His incessant craving for newness of women is for Mozart the symbol of our lust for immortality.

Perhaps unique in the history of Western music, the unholy idyl of demonism and angelism is again and again confirmed and each time strengthened by additional recurrences of the same motif. The First Act ends by adding the eighteenth-century stress on social egalitarianism. The shout of Viva la libertá during a festive occasion in the castle ballroom is taken up by all the dancers. Rebellion against authoritarianism, whether of state or church, allies itself to most forms of libertinage. Baudelaire remarked that the French Revolution was made by the voluptuary.⁴ Rebellion against absolutist power leads usually to anarchy

⁴Cited by Jouve, op. cit., p. 129.

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because the excess of freedom, rather than liberation from self-interest, results from a dazzling alliance between social utopianism and the attraction of the abyss.

The atmosphere of carefree pleasure over a chasm persists for several scenes in the first half of Act II. Degraded even more sordidly than before by the treachery of her lover, Donna Elvira becomes the most. tragic figure of the women he has abandoned. Like Donna Anna and. Zerlina, however, she continues to feel that her bond to Giovanni is, unbreakable, even in the vilest and most infamous torture of her deepest self. The aria Ah taci, ingiusto core has been hailed as the most. shameless confession of a woman's agony over a hopeless love. It places her above the lyrical heights reached by Donna Anna and Zerlina. Mozart has clearly willed to build up to a crescendo crushing flesh and soul and leading to an unbearable degree of abasement while working toward the crux of his musical conception-the final defiance of the Don.

V

As Giovanni compels his double, the servant Leporello, to accompany him to the cemetery and to issue an invitation to the statue of the Commendatore, only the art of Mozart renders the suspension of disbelief possible. It appeals to the supernatural in order to translate on stage some visionary states through the exteriorization of the hero's psychology.

The address to the Stone Monument begins as if the whole idea were an enormous joke against the macabre. Leporello reluctantly enters into the game, but his basso profundo eventually falters. Heavy notes of' strings and bassoons prepare his expostulation as he admits, Mi trema it core ... non posso terminar. Still, the apparent unconcern of the violins and flutes in the presence of a dead man about to rise from his grave makes the Don's playfulness the more horrible. The Statue becomes animated, as the Commendatore's ghost is ready to accept the Don's invitation to attend the banquet. The orchestral mood shifts from B major to B minor, and a syncopation of voices and bass chords outlines the steps of a descending staircase. The Statue nods. With a surge of the cellos, the servant exclaims, Colla marmorea testa, ei fa così, così, but ' Giovanni has not seen anything. He wishes only to prolong the obscene jest. At last, he himself invites the Commendatore to attend the supper at his palace, and the Stone Monument, now able to sing as well as to walk, replies Si, three times. The instrumental phrases fall into minor thirds. These underline the progress of Giovanni's doubt and at the: threshold of his consciousness the onrush of his existential finitude. He: begins to tremble. But his bravado lingers on. His heart of stone has not. yet been crushed.

Resplendent in white silk, the elegant monster now presides over the formal feast in the banquet hall of his castle. He enjoys the soft music of the chamber orchestra and seems heedless of his approaching doom.

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Donna Elvira, symbol of the compassionate feminine, appears at the door and cries out, L'ultima prova dell'amor mio ancor vogl'io fare con te. Piü non rammento gl'inganni tuoi, gl'inganni tuoi, pietade io sento! ... Vita cangi! ("I want to prove my love for thee one last time. I no longer remember thy deceits, thy deceits, I feel pity! ... Change [thy] life!") Her pleas are ignored. She screams in fright and hastens away.

At last, the Statue, true to his acceptance of the Don's invitation in the cemetery, is arriving. Leporello attempts a desperate buffoonery with his infinitely sad Tempo non ha, scusate! The violins murmur a moan, perhaps the grieving echo of a Greek chorus. Giovanni stands, his facade unaltered, and rises as the "Grand Ténor" of destiny as he sings, A torto di viltate tacciato mai sarö. The Spanish nobleman will never be charged with cowardice, but the sounds of the ghostly steps harass his melody almost note for note. The Commendatore's turn has come. He demands a response to his offer, Dammi la mano in pegno! Seemingly unafraid, the Don extends his hand. As he touches the cold fingers of the dead man, he shouts, Eccola! Ohimé! The Commendatore insists, Pentiti, cangia vita, e l'ultimo momento! The reiterated injunction Cangia vita! is each time accentuated with a fortissimo wave of woodwind and brass, prolonged by viciously fricative bowing by the cellos and double basses, which one recognizes as the clashing of swords in the duel at the beginning of the opera.

Through the solemn majesty of the music, we know that we are no longer hearing the phantom of the man who Giovanni had killed, but the voice of God. A century before Nietzsche, Mozart intuited that God is dead because the creature has murdered the creator. Both the melodies and their orchestration far surpass the words of the libretto. At the last minute, the Don discovers not only the inevitability and the proximity of his own death, but also the possibility of salvation. Divine grace may still abound. Such are the unmistakable hints of Mozart's musical phrases.

The appeal is rejected. The proud hero, defiant as ever, seeks in vain to sever himself from the hand that clasps and even grips his. No, no, ch'io non mi pento, vanne lontan da me! The composer's genius moves from the level of conscious psychology to that of unconscious theology. Or is it that Mozart's religious vision was tantamount to a revelation?

The hand proffered is also the hand that seizes. Love does not cancel out justice. The grace of God is the power that refuses to let go. The ghost of the Commendatore is no longer Don Giovanni's victim, but the figure of the divine Father, stern yet compassionate. Was not the composer obsessed by attachment to his own father, Leopold Mozart?

In his controversial play Amadeus, Peter Shaffer deliberately identified the Commendatore's black silhouette with Mozart's own image of his father and also with the figure of the mysterious man who had commissioned the Requiem and had become the symbol of Death.⁵

⁵See Samuel Terrien, "Amadeus Revisited," Theology Today 42 (January, 1986), pp. 440 ff.

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In bringing his opera to a close, the distressed artist was "seeing" a distorted, guilt-inspired, tyrannical judge, but he also showed a perceptive comprehension of the religious struggle which prophets, mystics, and saints have often recorded in recollecting the awesome moment of their conversion. While they finally said "Yes," the Mozartian Don said "No."

To the urgent Pentiti! Repent! the reply swiftly strikes No!, with a deafening crash of brass. It terminates three times with the Si of the command rebutting the No of the damned.

As the Statue vanishes, the flames rise from the ground, and the rhythm of the steps accelerates in syncopated cadence until the melody, thunderously supported by the orchestra, engulfs The Blasphemer, unrepentant, regretting nothing, and at the last moment shrieking, Come mi fa terror!

VI

Mozart's opera has never needed to be revived. It has held the footlights continuously for two hundred years on most of the world's stages.⁶ Is the music alone the secret of its fascination.

Some critics have suggested that every man secretly desires to possess the Spanish grandee's stamina and to imitate his successes. Similarly, it has been said that every woman inwardly wishes, against her better judgment, to be seduced by the resplendent tenor, superb in his gold and black or white silk. The truth may lie, rather, with Mozart's own ambivalence toward his hero and the tour-de-force in the play of rhythms and aural colors for this unique blending of tragic and comic, demonic and sublime, perversity and innocence.⁷

It should be remembered that Don Giovanni was conceived only a few years after the publication of Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos and that Mozart collaborated actively with Lorenzo da Ponte, his librettist. This friend of Casanova was surely a roué, but the composer, in his own way, had experienced a wild spectrum of trials and adulation. We may surmise that the music was already singing in his mind while he was toying with the words.

Karl Barth indulged in one of his flashes of hyperbole when he wrote, "Don Giovanni has nothing to do with the myth of the eternal libertine."⁸ He probably meant that the Donjuanesque theme offered

⁶The recent Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman is evidence of public interest in the legend. Unfortunately, the section on "Don Juan in Hell"' was omitted from the production.

⁷See Jacques Duron, "Mozart et le mythe de Don Juan," La Revue Musicale, no. 2515 (1965), pp. 7-21; Hermann Apert, Mozart's Don Giovanni, tr. by Peter Gellhorn (London: Eulenburg, 1976); Jean-V. Hocquard, Le Don Giovanni de Mozart (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978).

⁸Karl Barth, "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart," tr. Walter M. Mosse, in Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, ed. Walter Leibrecht (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 75.

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Mozart a springboard from which his musical genius could soar to higher and wider spheres. Perhaps unwittingly, Mozart molded the Don Juan of Molina and Moliére into the Don Giovanni, snatcher of infinity.

Kierkegaard alluded many times to Don Giovanni in his writings.⁹ He was correct in stating that the notorious blasphemer never knew love, but the reason for Kierkegaard's judgment was flawed by his belief that there is no love unless it be unhappy love. One can scarcely assert that Don Giovanni was made happy by his many conquests. Aristotle's famous dictum, Omne animal post coitum triste est, is belied by the experience of sexual fulfillment through mutuality and the inclusiveness of all human faculties, from sensation to sentiment and an emotional culmination close to metaphysical ecstasy. Don Giovanni was clearly dissatisfied by every amorous encounter. Kierkegaard confessed in a paradoxical mood that he himself had to live without love on account of Mozart! He wrote:

Ye, secret, festive, seductive strains which ... beguiled me by a sense of loss, like a recollection, most terrible, as if Elvira had not been seduced at all but only desired to be! Immortal Mozart, to whom I owe all! I belong ... no more to this world, but only to the solemn thought of death!¹⁰

Within this lyrical expostulation lies Kierkegaard's confusion over the meaning of eros-incidentally, continued by Anders Nygren-and ignorance of the eros-agape continuum, which already long ago was metaphorically implied by the prophet Hosea and the poet of the Song of Songs.¹¹ It is, however, obvious that the true sensualist would not change partners every night. Even for hedonistic reasons, he would cultivate a harmony of spirits of which the flesh would become both the consummation and the means for further exaltation.

At the same time, Mozart by his music has clearly intimated that Don Giovanni is a seeker of truth and covets beyondness. His aim may be distorted and his method totally inhuman through his misogyny, but the opera offers a compelling paradigm of what Milan Kundera calls The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This modern Don Giovanni, Tomas, has chosen to fight "the burden of heaviness" (Nietzsche), our natural weight that lets us fall into dreary staticity and arrests our spiritual growth.

⁹See a score of references in his Journal, as well as "In Vino Veritas," Stages on Life's Way; "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic or the Musical Erotic," Either/or; etc. Convenient extracts may be found in Denis de Rougement, Comme Toi-meme: Essais sur les Mythes de l'Amour (Paris: Albin Michel, 1961), pp. 103-59; cf. English translation, Love Declared: Essays on the Myth of Love, tr. Richard Howard (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

¹⁰"In Vino Veritas," Stages on Life's Way, tr. Walter Lowrie; see A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton: University Press, 1946), p. 181.

¹¹See Samuel Terrien, Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 29-39.

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VII

Having lost his faith in God and finding true love inaccessible., Mozart's hero invents a carnal substitute that enables him "to hate all that passes away, all that yields, all the heaviness of the world."¹² Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), by Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, presents a similar character, Fiorentino, who descends to a pluralism of love affairs for the sake of Petrarchian fidelity to the idealization of a woman who is at last revealed in her paltry old age.

Mozart's music reaches a level far superior to that of literary Donjuanism. Recurrent throughout the opera, unexpected vocal lines and their orchestral support unmistakably demonstrate that "what is light weighs immensely" and "what is heavy floats."¹³

At the ultimate instant, when Don Giovanni shrieks his dread at the sight of the flames and does so in the key of D minor, he "expires," or breathes out Ah! in the key of D major. A sudden luminousness shines over the scene, not the reddish flames of retribution, but the clear whiteness of ethereality. The burden of finitude and turpitude is lifted into authentic lightness. It is a luminosity similar to that which surrounds Elvira's magnanimous appeal to her unworthy lover and her adumbration of divine grace. For Mozart, death is no longer simply the sole exit from defiance, but a deliverance.

The Basel theologian's thunder was amazingly tamed by the Salzburg genius when Barth wrote:

With God, the world, men, himself, heaven and earth, life-and, above all, death-before his eyes, in his ears and in his heart he was ... a free man.... Darkness, chaos, death, and hell render themselves conspicuous but are not allowed to prevail even for a moment.... The rays of the sun disperse the night.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the hint of salvation illuminating the opera does not cancel out the demands of a transcendent faith. For Mozart as well as for Barth, the Lord God Almighty will not be mocked.

Is then Don Giovanni the ancestor of the modern self?¹⁵ He pursues the cult of self through the ever-renewed gratification of a one-sided erbs. Modern personality pursues the cult of self through various aberrations or illusions, especially the adolescent trust in technology as panacea. Respective methods may differ, but they share one characteristic. Have we not, like the Don, expelled transcendence from our universe, and are we, too, not forced to confront the Void?

¹² De Rougemont, op. cit., p. 107.

¹³Barth, op. cit., p. 73.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 75-77.

¹⁵Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust, and Don Giovanni have often "been adduced as type figures of Western man" (Andrew Porter, "Another Orpheus Sing," The New Yorker, June 6,1988, p. 111).