MOZART AS DRAMATIST
35
of the imaginative level. That is quite undramatic. There is no ul–
timate epiphany, as in
Figaro,
and there really could not have been
within the range of this excellently calculated libretto.
The libretto for
Cost fan tutte
was too nearly perfect, in its soul–
less terms, for Mozart to deal with it properly in his. But the libretto
for
Don Giovanni
left much to be desired-more than a composer
was able to supply.
Now the critical attitude towards
Don Giovanni
has really
changed as much as that towards
COSt fan tufte,
though in just the
opposite way. The Romantics worshipped it as a unique masterpiece,
the only opera in which Mozart touched the daemonic roots of
reality. From E.
T.
A.
Hoffmann and Kierkegaard to Bernard Shaw
and Richard Strauss, Don Giovanni has been idealized into a Faust
or a Superman, a shining knight of the
ewig Weibliche
if not the life–
force itself. Only in the twentieth century has historical scholarship
labored to reveal the opera as an ordinary farce with supernatural
additions, clumsily grafted together and blessedly over-composed. The
story, apparently, was well known in
opera buffa,
and indeed dis–
credited, fit for the provinces.
If
Da Ponte hadn't known that Mozart
would be sure to spruce it up, he probably would never have touched
it. The speed with which the piece had to be written explains certain
crudities; Da Ponte was busy with two more fashionable composers
and only had time to expand a previous libretto for Mozart. Since
Don Giovanni
was ordered for the city that loved
Figaro,
the authors
set out to duplicate the winning features of that opera. Once Dent
has pointed it out, it is easy to see that
Don Giovanni
was originally
laid out in the unusual four-act scheme of
Figaro,
in order to include
much action; that it exploits the same social complex of masters and
servants; that it has the same baritone preponderance and three
women, having been designed for the same company; and that many
arias echo numbers in the earlier opera. "I know this thing only too
well!" says Leporello when Don Giovanni's band plays the latest hit
from
Figaro.
The dependence runs deeper. The success of
Figaro
in Prague
went to Mozart's head as well as to his heart, and
Don Giovanni,
written less than a year later, shows wonderful signs of his eagerness
