Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season September-October 2015 | Page 32

{ program notes
become two operatic divas, soprano and
contralto. Chromatic harmonies and bold
dissonance color long-spun vocal lines
and reveal a grownup Mozart who has
suffered and learned how to transform
pain into high art. The vivacious finale
is in the rondo form Mozart favored for
his concerto last movements, with a
merry, infectious theme returning over
and over in between contrasting episodes.
Instrumentation: Two oboes, two horns
and strings.

Selections from DON GIOVANNI

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
In January 1787, just as Mozart’s
popularity in Vienna went into a slump,
the city of Prague, capital of the thenAustrian province of Bohemia, came to
the rescue. His latest opera, Le nozze di
Figaro, was such a tremendous success
at the Prague National Theater that the
entire city was gripped by Figaro-mania.
Mozart was there to witness it all and
described a ball given in his honor: “I
looked on … with the greatest pleasure
while all these people flew about in
sheer delight to the music of my Figaro,
arranged for contradances and German dances. For there, they talk about
nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played,
sung, or whistled but Figaro. No opera
is drawing like Figaro. … Certainly a
great honor for me!” Not surprisingly,
the National Theater promptly offered a
commission for a new comic opera, and
it turned out to be one of his greatest
masterpieces: Don Giovanni, premiered
in Prague on October 29, 1787.
Nevertheless, the new opera wasn’t
exactly a light-weight comedy; Mozart
and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte called
it a “dramma giocoso” because, to an
unprecedented degree, it combined comic
elements with a very serious drama of
crime and punishment. It was based on
an already familiar story about a dissolute
nobleman who relentlessly seduces women
and is finally brought to justice by the
ghost of a man he killed during one of his
amorous escapades. The Spaniard Tirso

30

O v ertur e

| WWW. BSOMUSIC .ORG

de Molina had published the tale in 1630,
and numerous playwrights and librettists,
including Molière and Goldoni, had created their own versions. And in Mozart’s
own day, Gluck had composed a ballet
on the subject and Gazzoniga an Italian
opera that had premiered a few months
earlier. Knowing he could crib from these
other sources, Da Ponte suggested this
plot to Mozart partly because it would
make his own job crafting a libretto that
much easier.
Also the librettist for Figaro, the colorful Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) was
in such demand as a librettist that he was
then working on three projects simultaneously, including an opera for Mozart’s
rival, Antonio Salieri. Perhaps because he
was a friend of a real-life lover of prodigious appetites, Giacomo Casanova, and,
though ordained a priest, had enjoyed
plenty of amorous adventures of his own,
he made the seducer Don Giovanni into
a more sympathetic character — someone
audiences would find as irresistible as did
his legions of feminine conquests.

Undoubtedly the opera’s
most famous aria,
“Madamina, il catalogo’
è questo,” is sung by
Giovanni’s servant Leporello.
Nevertheless, it is the splendor of
Mozart’s score and his unique ability to
devise music that revealed the individual
personality of each character that lofted a
shopworn tale into a masterpiece. We will
hear a selection of numbers that introduces
us to the Don himself, his nimble servant
Leporello and three of the ladies he tries
in vain to seduce. We will also experience
the opera’s spectacular last scene in which
Giovanni finally meets his doom.
In two parts, the opera’s riveting
Overture encapsulates both the tragic and
the comic aspects of this dramma giocoso.
First, we hear a slow introduction in D
Minor, full of darkness and foreboding;
its whirling scales terrifyingly portray the
supernatural forces that will ultimately

destroy the Don; this music returns in
the opera’s final scene. Then the tempo
accelerates, and the key brightens to
D Major for music of comic verve, its
dashing fanfares a portrait of the virile
Don himself.
Undoubtedly the opera’s most famous
aria, “Madamina, il catalogo’ è questo,”
is sung by Giovanni’s servant Leporello
to the distraught Donna Elvira after
his boss has left her in the lurch once
again. Unfurling a seemingly endless
list of names — Giovanni’s thousands of
conquests throughout the lands of Europe
— he assures her she was not the first of
his victims, nor will she be the last. This is
one of Mozart’s slyest and most skillfully
conceived comic arias, its breathless pace
capturing the enormity of Giovanni’s
career and the breadth of his appetites.
Rivaling this aria in fame is the sweetly
reassuring duet “Là ci darem la mano”
Giovanni uses to try to sed X