All About You: Mozart, Da Ponte, and Don Giovanni

When two great friends collaborate artistically, and produce profoundly stirring results, there is no greater pleasure in life. But close friendship is by no means a prerequisite for such results, nor does it in any way guarantee them, for often the most unlikely alliances can produce extraordinary artistic issue. Two creators, or two performers, may have very little in common, and may not even particularly enjoy one another’s company; and yet the communication between them on a supermundane level can lead to a sharing of ideas, instincts, and reflexes, where the total exceeds the sum of the parts. On the face of it, the collaboration between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, in the mid-1780s in Vienna, was not an obvious one at all. Da Ponte was a natural partner for the Court composer in Vienna, Antonio Salieri (they were the same age, and of the same nationality), and he did indeed produce librettos for him. But between Mozart and the “new Italian poet,” as the intrigued Mozart described him in a letter to his father, there were vast areas of agreement, like-mindedness, and vision. Although Mozart and Da Ponte eyed each other with curiosity, even caution, for a few years, it was perhaps only a matter of time before these two veritable geniuses would converge. 

The paths of Mozart and Da Ponte to their collaboration in Vienna, in the summer of 1786, were very different, but shared some significant touchstones. Mozart’s operatic awareness had been ignited, at the age of 11, by the experience of observing opera seria in Vienna, mainly under the distinguished and benevolent eye of its prime provider, Johann Adolf Hasse. Later, the teenage Mozart and his father Leopold subsequently made three trips to Italy, traveling widely within the country that had invented opera and was still its greatest influencer, and its greatest supplier of both composers and singers. Every city and town had an opera house (Salzburg, where the Mozarts lived and Leopold worked, had none), and the boy became obsessed with the art form. He reveled in the high standards in Milan, Bologna, Florence, Naples, and Venice; he was honored by academics, and in Rome by the Pope; and in Venice especially, where he arrived during its celebrated Carnival season, he was thrilled by the street spectacle of elaborate masks and costumes.  

Between 1770 and 1773, when Mozart was aged 14 to 17, he was actually commissioned to write three operas (Mitridate, re di Ponto, Ascanio in Alba, and Lucio Silla) for the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan, the prime opera house in Italy and therefore the world, and he honed his craft there through working with the most distinguished singers of the age. But his operatic leanings were then frustrated as, back in Salzburg, he had to toe different lines. Such invitations to write opera that he did receive temporarily assuaged his thirst, but did not satisfy it. La finta giardiniera for Munich in 1774 was an opera buffa, performed by overworked singers considerably less accomplished than those he had experienced in Milan. A year later Il re pastore, for the visit of a young Habsburg Archduke to Salzburg, was a brief allegorical piece put together very quickly and semi-staged in the State Rooms of the Archbishop’s Palace. Mozart’s encounter with the musical Weber family in Mannheim in 1777, and in particular his infatuation with the second daughter Aloysia, who would become the most distinguished singer of her own generation, reignited his passion for opera. But it continued to be thwarted by lack of opportunity, and it was not until four years later, in 1781, that he produced for Munich what is arguably the finest opera seria of the 18th century, Idomeneo, re di Creta.  

After Mozart’s (very welcome) dismissal from his Salzburg employment later in 1781, he settled in Vienna where there was abundant opportunity for musical collaboration with extremely distinguished musicians, even without any permanent employment. He married Aloysia’s younger sister Constanze Weber, and established his own series of concerts as he built up a reputation. He could not infiltrate the Court where Salieri ruled the roost, but he wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio for the German National Theatre at Vienna’s Burgtheater, again with distinguished singers. Then in 1785, a new influx of Italian singers arrived, and in the following year the Emperor Joseph II put on an evening of operatic entertainment in the Orangery at his palace in Schőnbrunn. Mozart’s hilarious Der Schauspieldirektor, with superb singers, brought him back into the operatic limelight, by which time the “new Italian poet” had noticed the brilliant young Austrian with superb theatrical instincts and endless facility, and their brilliant first collaboration, The Marriage of Figaro, was already in preparation.  

Lorenzo Da Ponte’s own path to this moment was even more eccentric than Mozart’s. Born into a Jewish family in Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto) in 1749, he had converted to Christianity at the age of 14, when his father had married his non-Jewish stepmother. He seems to have had no formal schooling at all, yet at the age of 21 he was teaching literature at a seminary in Portogruaro, and writing poetry on all manner of subjects. He took holy orders, acquiring his title “Abbate,” although, as later events would reveal, he was wildly unsuited to a religious calling. By 1773, when he was 24, he was in Venice, where he became a close acquaintance of Casanova, and like his friend had many adulterous affairs, one of which led to his eventual banishment from the entire Venetian Republic, in 1779. After short spells in Gorizia and Dresden, Da Ponte arrived in Vienna in 1781, the same year as Mozart. He made contact with his influential countryman, Salieri, who encouraged him to apply for the post of poet to the Burgtheater. There his tasks were to oversee the provision of all librettos for the theater, whether translations or adaptation of plays or existing librettos, or original creations. As Mozart observed, Da Ponte had “an enormous amount to do.” 

Mozart and Da Ponte had in fact much common ground. In a crucially fundamental sense, they were both disenchanted with the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement, so beloved of the Emperor, had effectively turned society away from religion, and toward reason as the chief tool for understanding human life. Education, and the idea of learning through experience, were part of this rationality, and most artistic works, certainly including Mozart’s Idomeneo and The Abduction from the Seraglio, were passionate advocates for this Age of Reason. Yet there was something essentially empty about it. Rousseau, in his Second Discourse, issued a stern warning to a society guided only by material values: “We have only honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.” Mozart and Da Ponte shared this view, as their collaborations indicate. They were both essentially outsiders, never fully accepted by the establishment; yet their peripatetic earlier lives, together with their current situation on the fringes of society, had furnished them with superb powers to observe, accumulate, and interpret the infinite varieties of human behavior. Each could therefore portray immense subtlety in theatrical characterization, whether for instance in the different modes of expression between the different classes, or in overt and covert manifestations of real human emotion. The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte all break through the barriers surrounding conventional society, with all its manners and proprieties, and release the emotional turmoil within. All essentially modern (whether an adaptation of a current—and highly controversial—play, a contemporary reworking of a well-told myth, or a newly-invented story about fashionable society), these three masterpieces hold up a mirror to the audience: it is their manners and behavior which are being so forensically presented and investigated. “This,” they seem to say, “is all about you.” 

And significantly, both Mozart and Da Ponte had experienced first-hand the splendid event of Venetian Carnival. Mozart never forgot his slightly wild time there in his teenage visit (quite apart from anything else, it was in Venice that he had unleashed a teenage passion for the opposite sex); and Da Ponte had resided in that most seductive, most liberal, most degenerate perhaps, of cities, with its masks and disguises, and its illicit assignations conducted under cover of watery darkness. All three of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas would draw on this richest of memories, using disguise and that Venetian mask as a device with which ultimately to discover the truth, in a manner at once entertaining and disturbing. In Figaro, the Countess and Susanna exchange clothes in order to entrap the Count. In Così fan tutte, Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to leave town, only to return disguised as Albanians, to test the affections of their sweethearts, whose own maid Despina adopts a series of identities as the cruel plot grows apace. And in Don Giovanni, not only do Giovanni and Leporello swap clothes for the dual purpose of deflecting Elvira and seducing her maid, but three of Giovanni’s avengers, Anna, Elvira and Ottavio, all put on masks and gate-crash his party. The whole process of disguise allows a person to become someone else and behave entirely differently; and a pot of intrigue is stirred. 

And there are other, musical, masks too in Don Giovanni. When in the opening scene Giovanni fatally wounds Anna’s father, the music seems to acquire the lyrical simplicity of a Moonlight Sonata, but in fact contains within it all the horror of a violent crime and the final gasps of a dying man. At the party scene in the Act I finale, Giovanni lays on three bands playing in different meters at the same time (brilliantly delivered by Mozart), in order to layer confusion on the scene and further his pursuit now of Zerlina. Early in the second act, Leporello acts out the role of ventriloquist’s dummy as Giovanni sweetly serenades Elvira, and she falls for it: she is being humiliatingly tricked, and the music again is of heart-stopping beauty. And when poor Elvira learns the truth, her wildly angular aria of distress, “Mi tradì quest’alma ingrata,” in fact expresses her anxiety not for herself but for the man she still loves. The more one probes beneath the surface of the text—line after brilliant line—and the music, the more complex and multi-faceted the content is revealed. 

In fact, the whole opera of Don Giovanni can be seen as some sort of mask. “Dramma giocoso,” it proclaims itself on its title page, and to be sure there are definite strands of comedy. The audience is riveted by theatrical activity, and enchanted by exquisite and incomparable music. But this opera is a dark, disturbing, and dangerous work, and by the end of it the lives of all its protagonists are, if not ruined, permanently damaged. For all the melodrama of the quasi-supernatural denouement, ultimately Don Giovanni is a story of human nature, and of its infinite capacity for self-destruction.