36
PARTISAN REVIEW
to develop his artistic gains.
Figaro
is remarkable for its graphic real–
ism, which was unprecedented in
opera buffa,
and which Mozart
must have stumbled upon under the influence of Beaumarchais' ad–
mirably realistic play. He applied and deepened the same quality
of realism in
Don Giovanni;
but it was really rather thoughtless to
have done so with this picaresque, supernatural, and not at all con–
temporary story. (Mozart never attempted such realism later, with
COSt
fan tutte
or
T he Magic Flute.)
Almost accidentally, we may
suppose, Mozart had discovered in
Figaro
the serious possibilities in–
herent in comic opera. His enthusiasm for pressing this discovery is
everywhere apparent in
Don Giovanni;
he is ready to take anything
and anybody seriously. To a composer in this frame of mind, Donna
Anna was a priceless gift from the poet: a full-fledged Metastasian
heroine, but for once in a vivid, naturalistic context! Beside her,
Idomeneo's
Electra and
Tito's
Vitellia seem pale and orderly. Mozart,
now intoxicated with the dramatic power of the ensemble, left the
greatest of all examples of this quintessential form in
Don Giovanni.
H e rejoiced in
tours de force;
one dazzling effect follows another;
the drama gets out of hand.
If
Figaro
was an extremely clever work,
Don Giovanni
is magnificently brash. Perhaps it had to be, with that
hoary subject matter.
Don Giovanni
is Mozart's richest score, and
the dearest of all his operas to the musician, as it is to the opera–
going public today.
The ballroom scene in
Don Giovanni
is one of the most brilliant
things in all of opera. The celebrated Minuet here is not a "Mozart–
ian" minuet; Mozart wrote it to sound archaic, stilted, a little absurd,
and utterly empty. Against it the desperate intrigue proceeds in
alarmingly naturalistic whispers. When Mozart then introduced two
more dances simultaneously with the Minuet, all combined with
mathematical inevitability and insanity, he created exactly the right
effect of disorder within the rigidity of convention. It was an effect
that Verdi could not recapture in
Rigoletto
or
Un Ballo in Maschera .
Mozart's developing sense of musical means for drama is illus–
trated by his reworking of one small detail from
Figaro.
In the Sextet
of Act II in
Don Giovanni,
the modulatory shock of the conspirators
when Leporello throws off his disguise and explains that they have
not caught Giovanni after all is parallel to, but better managed than,
