Introduction
Rewriting the myth of Don Juan
The demonising of Don Giovanni: A historical overview
Chapter 1: Luigi Bassi as Don Giovanni
The singer and his role
Intention and experience: Prescriptive and descriptive sources
The performer as a phenomenon
Grace and gallantry: Bassi’s portrayal
Performance traditions: Italians and Germans
Chapter 2: The opening scene
Chapter 3: Don Giovanni and the three women
Donna Elvira’s entrance aria
The duettino
The quartet and Donna Anna’s narration
Chapter 4: The party episode
The champagne aria
The garden scene
The ballroom scene
Chapter 5: The disguise episode
The first duet with Leporello
The trio
The canzonetta
The disguise aria
Chapter 6: The graveyard scene
Chapter 7: The second finale
The supper
The last encounter with Donna Elvira
Don Giovanni and the stone guest
The final scene
Postscript: In defence of the operatic work
Bibliography
Magnus Tessing Schneider (Stockholm University) is a Danish theatre scholar specialising in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian opera. He has edited Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: A Reappraisal (2018), together with Ruth Tatlow, and Felicity Baker’s essay collection Don Giovanni’s Reasons: Thoughts on a Masterpiece (2021).
This was just the book I needed when staging Don Giovanni. Magnus
Tessing Schneider has done a fantastic job documenting the
preparations that led to the first performance of this most
controversial of operas, in Prague in 1787. Building on facts, he
dares oppose the false tradition that emerged after the deaths of
Mozart and Da Ponte, and which portrays the title character as
simply ‘a bad man who ends up in hell’. As I read this inspiring
book, I understood why Giovanni is rather like Carmen, that other
rebellious spirit who is also killed and with whom we also
sympathize. Might we do so because they are free in a way that we
are not? Presenting us with the enigma, the book leaves it to us to
find the answer.- Andrei Șerban, stage directorThis is an important
book. It is important as a radical historical reinterpretation of
an iconic work of art, but also as a defiant challenge to certain
tendencies in today’s intellectual climate. […]Tessing Schneider’s
historical examination is driven by a revisionist agenda but leans
on a patient and systematic argumentation based on a large and
diverse source material. It never becomes programmatic but is
characterised by a combination of rigorous source criticism and
inventive analytical observations. By means of this method, the
author reaches a new and enthralling understanding of one of the
most scrutinised works in the history of opera. He has presented us
with a Don Giovanni who is even more interesting, complex, and
thought-provoking than has commonly been assumed.Moreover, this
study is important because of what it reveals about a certain
contemporary inclination: an impulse towards simplification and
unambiguity in the interpretation of fictional stories and
characters, and towards the instrumentalisation of historical works
of art to suit present ideological agendas."Lars Berglund, Swedish
Journal of Music Research
This was just the book I needed when staging Don Giovanni. Magnus
Tessing Schneider has done a fantastic job documenting the
preparations that led to the first performance of this most
controversial of operas, in Prague in 1787. Building on facts, he
dares oppose the false tradition that emerged after the deaths of
Mozart and Da Ponte, and which portrays the title character as
simply ‘a bad man who ends up in hell’. As I read this inspiring
book, I understood why Giovanni is rather like Carmen, that other
rebellious spirit who is also killed and with whom we also
sympathize. Might we do so because they are free in a way that we
are not? Presenting us with the enigma, the book leaves it to us to
find the answer.- Andrei Șerban, stage directorThis is an important
book. It is important as a radical historical reinterpretation of
an iconic work of art, but also as a defiant challenge to certain
tendencies in today’s intellectual climate. […]Tessing Schneider’s
historical examination is driven by a revisionist agenda but leans
on a patient and systematic argumentation based on a large and
diverse source material. It never becomes programmatic but is
characterised by a combination of rigorous source criticism and
inventive analytical observations. By means of this method, the
author reaches a new and enthralling understanding of one of the
most scrutinised works in the history of opera. He has presented us
with a Don Giovanni who is even more interesting, complex, and
thought-provoking than has commonly been assumed.Moreover, this
study is important because of what it reveals about a certain
contemporary inclination: an impulse towards simplification and
unambiguity in the interpretation of fictional stories and
characters, and towards the instrumentalisation of historical works
of art to suit present ideological agendas.- Lars Berglund, Swedish
Journal of Music ResearchConnecting [Mozart’s Don Giovanni] to the
practices and techniques of acting in the late Enlightenment opens
new possibilities for how future directors, performers, and
academics may perform or interpret it. […] As Schneider points out
[…], virtually every performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni since the
latter half of the nineteenth century portrays a villain who
deserves what he gets, and thus it may come as a surprise that
early productions with [Luigi] Bassi did not portray him acting
violently toward women. Schneider’s exploration of Bassi’s approach
therefore points to new or previously forgotten interpretations of
the title character. What makes these chapters particularly rich
and interesting for Don Giovanni fans is that they often provide a
line-by-line analysis of how Bassi incorporated specific ideas of
Mozart and Da Ponte into his performances. […] Through the analysis
of new sources pertaining to the inception and early reception of
Don Giovanni, Schneider’s work will surely make an excellent
companion to scholars and performers alike.- Robert Creigh,
Newsletter of the Mozart Society of AmericaOne of the book’s
strengths is multi-disciplinarity. Drawing on librettist Lorenzo Da
Ponte’s original Italian text and its various translations and
adaptations, analyses of different music manuscript versions,
biographical information gathered from memoirs, anecdotes, and
literary fiction, performance reviews, various renditions of
scenography and acting styles, as well as academic and critical
literature, Schneider is able to convey the complexities of
eighteenth-century opera and its contextual origins. […]Schneider’s
observations are assembled into a larger construction centred
around the development of the tradition of Don Juan and the stone
guest. From its seventeenth century multi-genre dramatic origins as
a popular tale of sin and retribution, complete with farcical as
well as superstitious elements, it was reinvented by Da Ponte and
Mozart, under the guise of opera buffa, into a critical
Enlightenment tragedy of a young galant homme; only to be
reappropriated by nineteenth century Romantic translators and
commentators, reverting it to a Christian moral system, with a
lasting impact on the reception of the opera and its title role. In
this way, Schneider places the stone guest tradition within a
framework of four centuries of shifting world conceptions, with the
Enlightenment artists and connoisseurs appearing as the short-lived
heroes of free aesthetic expression in close kinship with the
tragic Don Giovanni himself.In Schneider’s reading, the seductive
powers of the title role are a metaphor for the powers of the real
seducer – the musical maestro, with his capacity for mesmerizing
the audience. It is tempting to extend this metaphor to encompass
the function of the historiographer. Schneider’s carefully
constructed body of evidence, engagingly set forth, presents a very
convincing case of how different the 1787 Don Giovanni of Bassi,
Mozart, and Da Ponte must have appeared to the audience and critics
of the time, compared to the current understanding. The elegant
libertine versus the violent brute, the serenading seducer versus
the rapist, the 21-year-old adventurer versus the middle-aged
lecher.- Annabella Skagen, Nordic Theatre Studies
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