MOZART AS DRAMATIST
39
would be a dramatic possibility, but instead we have accidental and
unformed ambiguity. Either Da Ponte was unaware of all the ques–
tions which he conjured up along with his devils, or else he deliber–
ately pushed them under. Certainly the Epilogue answers none of
them; it merely shows how drab life is without the Don.
It is no use speculating on what might have been. Mozart, who
transformed other dramas, might have transformed this one, but Da
Ponte is mostly responsible for the weakness. After all, nobody be–
lieves in ghosts and devils, least of all Don Giovanni; such things
can assuredly be put on the stage, but only on the strict condition
that the convention and the attitude are clearly established. This is
what everyone else has done who has dealt with Don Juan or any
of his dramatic brothers. But Da Ponte failed to rationalize the action.
One rather suspects that he lacked the intellectual force to cope
with it.
Kierkegaard first spoke of a magic "marriage" between the
genius of Mozart and the subject-matter of Don Juan, and many
have followed him in this view. I myself could not disagree more
completely; the whole basis of the Don Juan legend seems to me
curiously out of Mozart's intellectual, ethical, and metaphysical style.
Very few people nowadays see Mozart as a "daemonic" composer,
even if they think of music as a daemonic art. In a work like the
g-minor Quintet, we sense an exquisitely constrained pathos, in the
Piano Concerto in c-minor a controlled foreshadowing of Beetho–
venian tragedy, in the Requiem Mass a certain frustration strikingly
symbolized by its noncompletion.
As
an opera composer, Mozart had
dwelt more profoundly than anyone else on man in relation to other
men and women, never in relation to God and the universe. Then
suddenly theology was thrust on him at the end of
Don Giovanni–
right at the end, when things were getting rushed, as usual. He did
his best, a very wonderful best, but everything we know or feel about
Mozart should assure us that the inflexible view of sin and death set
forth in the legend must have been distasteful to him. Mozart never
saw man's will as inevitably opposed by the will of God. He con–
ceived an essential harmony expressed by human feelings; his terms
were brotherhood and sympathy and humility, not damnation and
defiance. The magic marriage is
The Magic Flute.
