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E-book The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni

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Penilaian

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When Carl Maria von Weber conducted Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Dresden in the 1820s, one of the people sitting in the auditorium was the Italian singer Luigi Bassi who had created the title role back in 1787. And he was not pleased with what he saw. ‘Bassi generally passed the judgement on all Don Giovannis whom he and I saw performing’, his friend Count Hohenthal recalled a few years after the singer’s death in 1825, ‘that they, with their pretentious portrayals, repre-sented Madrilenian butchers rather than Spanish gentlemen’.1 Indeed, people who had seen Bassi himself perform the role tended to emphasise the gentle-manly qualities of his portrayal. According to the daughter of the soprano Luigia Sandrini-Caravoglia, for example, who had sung Donna Anna to Bassi’s Don Giovanni in Prague in the early nineteenth century, ‘his impeccable, chivalrous elegance and his seductive charm towards the women’ not only made him ‘the unequalled performer of this part’ but also ‘the darling of the Prague ladies, even of those belonging to the highest aristocracy’.2Such memoirs of the original Don Giovanni are remarkable because they reflect a conception of the character fundamentally different from the one we mostly encounter on stage today. In Christof Loy’s Frankfurt production of 2014, to mention just one example, Mozart’s seducer is portrayed as a cantankerous old lecher, devoid of charm or humour, whose pursuit of sexual conquests has long ago become a mechanical habit. Boorish in his treatment of the women and his servant Leporello, he is outright violent towards Donna Anna, whom he tries to rape in full view of the audience, and towards the jealous peasant Masetto, whom he kicks and batters with the butt of a musket. It remains a mystery why Donna Elvira and Zerlina feel attracted to this brute.3 The contrast between such images of Don Giovanni, which we encounter in most productions today, and the way the role was performed by the singer for whom it was written is the point of depar-ture for this book. Combining the perspectives of the theatre and opera historian with that of the critic, it examines 1) how Don Giovanni was portrayed on stage, scene by scene, by Luigi Bassi; 2) the origins of today’s standard image of the character as arrogant and physically and emotionally abusive; and finally, 3) how Bassi’s portrayal may serve as a key to a historically informed interpretation of Don Giovanni.As for the last issue, the book is indebted to literary scholar Felicity Baker who argues that today’s image of Don Giovanni as a violent criminal and sexual preda-tor is a cultural projection that lacks basis in the text, an argument that we shall delve into in the following. The librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte depicted the seducer as frivolous and individualistic but also as essentially non-violent, in contrast to the way the Commendatore, Masetto and even Don Ottavio are depicted. That is because the opera is a critical rewriting of the traditional story of Don Juan and the stone guest, which through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had functioned as a vehicle for anti-libertine beliefs, invariably depicting the seducer as an abominable villain who deserves to die for his sins. In 1787, some audience members would have known that story from its classic dramatic treatments: Tirso de Molina’s play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1617), Molière’s comedy Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665) and Carlo Goldoni’s tragicomedyDon Giovanni Tenorio o sia Il dissoluto (1736). Most audience members, how-ever, would have known the story from various crowd-pleasing entertainments, or what I shall refer to as the popular Stone Guest tradition, which included eve-rything from commedia dell’arte plays, opere buffe and ballets d’action to All Souls’ Day farces, pantomimes and puppet shows. This tradition, which consti-tuted the real backbone of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Don Juan myth’, went back to the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The earliest known adaptation of Tirso’s play, Il convitato di pietra (1632) by the Florentine play-wright Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, already contains the stock farcical elements that we find in later versions, including Nunziato Porta’s and Vincenzo Righini’s opera Il convitato di pietra o sia Il dissoluto, which received its world premiere in Prague in 1776 and was produced in Vienna the following year.4 For Viennese theatregoers in the 1780s, though, the main reference point is likely to have been Karl von Marinelli’s play Dom Juan oder Der steinerne Gast, which was per-formed in the Theater in der Leopoldstadt every year around All Souls’ Day (2 November) from 1783 to 1821. Works like these were repeatedly condemned by the cultural elite for their improprieties and absurdities, critics especially pouring scorn on the supernatural ending where a chorus of devils are seen tormenting Don Juan after he has been sent to hell by a walking statue.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

782.1 SCH t

Penerbit

London : Taylor & Francis., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

261 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780429281709

Klasifikasi

782.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Dramatic Vocal Forms, Operas

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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