Ravinia 2022, Issue 4

KYLE FLUBACKER Hubris and supernatural justice catch up with Don Giovanni as the specter of the Commendatore drags the impertinent and impenitent Don to his rightful place in eternal damnation. leaves the “why” unanswered, and is a potent challenge to the possible futili- ty of questioning what drives the Don. We meet him and the Commendatore on their last day. The personal history of the Com- mendatore is unknown. He does not have a name, just a title. His dramatic function is to deliver a divine mes- sage, and when it is rejected, to inform the Don that his time has come. All we know about Don Giovanni is the depth and breadth of his misdeeds, but nothing at all about his person, who he is, nor how he came to be what he is. They fulfill their dramatic function in this fundamentally other- worldly drama of defiance and retri- bution. Divine justice is meted out. It has often been pointed out that Don Giovanni has no core to his personality. There is no “there” there. Mozart purposely deprives him of a self-revelatory or confessional aria. Unlike Verdi’s Iago, who explains himself in his credo, the Don never reveals anything. His three solo num- bers are one-dimensional snapshots (not complete arias) of what pro- pels him: wine (the drinking song), pursuit of deception and seduction (the serenade), and violence (as he prepares to beat Masetto). All the other characters are fully human. Tomes are written, rightly, discussing the three women. These fascinatingly diverse characters, Anna (the aristocrat), Elvira (the emerg- ing middle class), and Zerlina (the peasant), are bound together. Theirs is a shared misfortune: in crossing paths with this malevolent narcissist, their erotic impulses are challenged, violat- ed, awakened, magnified, or changed. One assumes that the lives of all of the 2,065 women inscribed in Leporello’s catalog (whose list includes Donna Elvira if not Donna Anna and Zer- lina) have been similarly impacted. Each principal woman develops in the course of events, and each is allotted arias in both acts to chart that growth. None is left unscarred by having been in the orbit, however briefly, of this destructive roving planet. At the end of the opera, Leporello the servant will seek another employer, and Ma- setto the peasant will attempt to eke out a living off the land. Don Ottavio of the landed aristocracy will try to go forward with Donna Anna, although Don Giovanni has struck closer to home for both of them. Mozart does not prognosticate their future. Donna Elvira, who for me is the most evolved human being of the entire story, will retire, at least for the moment, into a convent. Whether everyone’s lives are temporarily or irrevocably changed is a question that is left unanswered. Together they all try, and fail, to retaliate against the Don. Retribution is the province of the divine. “Ven- geance is mine saith the Lord,” we are told in the scriptures, and so it is for our “antihero.” Greeks of antiq- uity were punished by the gods for hubris and defiance. The sin of Adam, though variously interpreted, is es- sentially that of disobedience. On the day portrayed in the opera, the Don, who has seemingly gotten away with riding herd on society through his legion sexual misdeeds, has become a murderer, and there, it seems, a line has been crossed. Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been and will be seen as all things to all people: monstrous sexual predator, amoral iconoclast, devil, intellec- tual pioneer, free agent of anarchy and nihilism, self-styled defender of Rationalism, mentally deranged psychopath. The list could be endless. Through Mozart’s masterpiece, he has traveled the world through the centuries from the burlesque libertine of the original to, for better or worse, a fixture in our culture. Who he is, is unknowable, and what he represents, a matter of perpetual disagreement. He has always given us the slip, and always will. He himself told us so while escaping from Donna Anna in his opening line of the opera, utter- ing words as prophetic as they are emblematic: Chi son io, tu non saprai Who I am, you will not know! © James Conlon, revised 2022 RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 83