38
PART I SAN REV I EW
He is an unaware person for a Mozartian hero, though
his
charm,
largesse, ingenuity, and reasonableness are not left in doubt. The
singular fact is that until the end almost all of the action and musical
expression goes to illuminate the people with whom he is involved,
not Don Giovanni himself. This seems to me a dramatic mistake,
and one that was fatally compounded when Da Ponte began to build
the second act around Leporello; even the scene in the graveyard,
which certainly should involve Don Giovanni and the Statue, turns
out to be mostly about Leporello. Like Faust and Peer Gynt, Don
Juan goes through a series of loosely joined adventures. It was
clever and dramatic of Da Ponte to succeed in relating them so well;
but this very cleverness led him into an impasse which Marlowe and
Ibsen avoided-the adventures assume more interest than the hero.
To say that Don Giovanni's lack of involvement is precisely the
strongest element of his personality is to argue
ab vacuo;
in opera
we trust what is done most firmly by the music. The very blankness
of Don Giovanni's characterization, indeed, must have been what
especially attracted Romantic critics. Their daydreams and idealiza–
tions could sprout and flourish in Mozart's relative void.
Finally, though, Leporello is pushed under the table, in the great
scene where the Statue pulls Don Giovanni down to hell. Mozart
composed the Finale here
con amore;
it was another godsent oppor–
tunity to be serious and intense. The eighteenth century may have
been used to treating Don Juan in terms of farce with supernatural
additions, but under the influence of Mozart's setting of the catas–
trophe, we cannot shun its implications. Inherent in the legend is the
conflict between the glamour and the irrevocability of sin. The opera
merely enlarges this conflict-an expression of the "daemonic," or
else a weakness in the central conception, according to taste. Up to
the end, our sympathies have been enlisted for the hero in countless
ways; then Mozart shows him destroyed in a scene whose terror and
conviction suddenly dominate the drama.
As
the action touches Don
Giovanni at last, he rises magnificently to the occasion, fearless and
true to himself in a crisis which is past pride. In what way, then,
does he deserve his doom? What does Mozart think of his damnation?
What does Don Giovanni himself think-for presumably by this time
he will be open to some introspection? Honest and subtle equivocation
