(no subject)
I have never been any good at diaries, and honestly, the white page in front of you has a way of seeming to ask the question of the old(ish, by now)song: "What have you done today to make you feel proud?" In spite of what I wrote in my first entry, that open white space challenges you to put in something interesting.
Well, yesterday I took in hand the essay on the Longobard legend of Godan/Odin that had been laying half-completed in my computer for months. I have the ideas down pretty clearly, but to cast it into an intelligible shape and arrange the evidence and reasoning properly is proving the Devil's own business, mainly because it asks to be taken in two or three different directions - Indo-European comparison and specifics of the Germanic group of cultures, and perhaps local Longobard facts. In the course of this, I also had a frightful wrestling match with a piece of Carolingian Latin writing called the Historia Langobardorum of the Codex Gothanus. My Latin is only so-so, and, in so far as it is there at all, it is Classical; certainly not up to the kind of idiom used by this Carolingian-era writer, who uses verbs and even prepositions unknown to most Latin dictionaries - DEINTER, anyone? And all the Dark Age Latin I have handled so far has been Insular (British and Irish), which I am pretty sure represents a different kind of "dialect" from that of the author of the Codex Gothanus, who seems to have been an Italian transplanted in Fulda, Germany. Fun for all the family, this... And at the end, I found that the code actually had rather little to tell me about Longobard legend. Whoopee.
Today I finally completed my Internet connection, which means that I no longer have to go to the local library. I also completed the revision of a very old paper on the Crusades whose theory I still subscribe to, but which badly needed some work. I will publish it here in the next few days. Meanwhile, today I give an essay on Mozart's great opera DON GIOVANNI and its modern mishandling.
RAPE AND ROMANTICISM - by F.P.Barbieri
Mozart's Don Giovanni is one of the greatest operas ever composed, and practically every music lover alive knows it well. And yet the evidence is that singers, producers and conductors, let alone the public, simply do not understand what the work is about - even though its moral is by no means unclear.
This misunderstanding has taken more than one form. In the romantic nineteenth century people used to treat it as a comic opera; it was felt that the devilry, out of keeping as it was with the Romantic taste for the diabolic, was not to be taken seriously. More recently, though conductors and critics seem to have cottoned on to it that this is a serious work, an equally wrong-headed view has taken its place - that the protagonist is some sort of metaphysical hero in rebellion against the cosmos - an oddly nineteenth-century, Byronic view that the nineteenth century seems not to have thought of. I actually saw the expression "metaphysical heroism" used in a recent newspaper review, with no explanation or expansion, for all the world as if the thing was self-evident; it seems to be the orthodox view. (One is reminded of the similarly wrong-headed orthodoxy that Othello has something to do with colonialism.)
The curious thing about this Don Giovanni-olatry is that the type of Don Giovanni is today the most universal object of hatred and social contempt conceivable. Any contemporary who wrote a story about someone like him would only cast him as the villain; any person discovered, in real life, to behave like him, would be thrown into jail for life with no parole, to the applause of all the media whose reviewers still hymn the "metaphysical courage" of Da Ponte's character. To be blunt about it: Don Giovanni Tenorio is a serial rapist. He is a serial rapist and nothing else. All he is concerned with is to force his way into as many women as possible; when he invites a crowd of peasant lads and girls into his own house, it is with the stated purpose of adding at least ten notches to his count. He is simply incapable of seeing a woman, any woman, even an old crone (though young virgins, we are told, are his chief delight) without thinking of penetration.
When he has once had them, he is done; he does not even think of coming back for seconds. We should be struck by the way in which he does not even try to take advantage a second time of Donna Elvira, who is unhappily in love with him and takes very little effort to be talked into believing what she should know to be lies. He could have had her as many times as he wanted; he could even, I think, have got her to consent and take some sort of part, active or passive, in his lifestyle; so desperately does she need him. Instead, he pushes her off on his servant Leporello, as a thing to be got rid of and out of the way as fast as possible. The conquest, if not the rape, is the only thing that matters.
He is clearly unbalanced. All his behaviour in the play proves it: he is pathologically lacking in foresight, even to the extent of going back to his own house to feast in comfort after having been driven from it by people who had every reason to believe him guilty of the murder of the father of one of them. Any moderately sane man, even a criminal, would have taken flight, or alternatively plotted to kill his enemies to insure his own safety; not he. His mind is so much on rape and sex that he is simply incapable of thinking of anything else.
It may also be that he regards himself as invulnerable. Certainly his conceit is enormous. He does think of himself as of an uncommon being. The emphasis in his dinner scene, once he has returned home, is not so much on sensual enjoyment and self-indulgence, as on his own congratulations on his good taste. He regards himself as a master of taste in food, wine and music; when his servant is caught stealing some food, he wiggles out of it by flattering his master's taste - "your chef is so excellent, sir, I couldn't resist a bite".
We should not take this at face value: in a freer moment, Leporello had commented rather on his uncouth greed (barbaro appetito) - very unbecoming, we should think, a gentleman of taste and leisure - and Donna Elvira, a cultivated lady, had called the whole scene "foully stinking and horrible". The setting is that of a formal and luxurious dinner party, yet he is dining alone, and delighting in it. A dinner party, after all, would require him to put on some manners! He guzzles down food and wine in a completely abandoned manner, and we may doubt whether his fare is really as fine as he fancies it. Earlier in the play, he had started a party with sweets and chocolate; a poor witness to his taste. That was for a crowd of peasants, whose palates he perhaps regarded as not very discriminating; but it was two of them, Zerlina and Masetto, who remarked on the odd and unpleasant sweet start of the dinner (troppo dolce comincia la cena, in amaro potria terminar).
Da Ponte does not take the trouble to give a reason or an explanation for Don Giovanni's behaviour. This shows sound artistic judgement; not only does the play have no time for it, but an explanation in terms of cause and effect would spoil the artistic effect of Don Giovanni's personality. The man is incapable of looking at himself, let alone explaining his actions; before the curtain ever rises, he has left the rational faculty behind. He is already, as we see him, a moral ruin. The only time he is asked to give an account of his behaviour, he reacts with a disgusting and pathetic joke: he loves, he says, all women at once, and cannot stop to only one. After the murder and attempted rape we have seen, this sort of thing can only be described as insensitive trash. It is genuinely barbarous. It sounds even worse in Italian: in that language, to care for is said to want good to (voler bene a) and the very notion of Don Giovanni wanting any good for his victims is, I must say, revolting. The fact that it seems to be proffered in perfect seriousness only shows that he has lost any sense of reality. Of course, he is joking; he just no longer realizes that a cheap joke is not a sufficient answer to the question.
How much more do we have to witness before we realize that the notion of metaphysical heroism is as out of place here as that of his own love and benevolence for all women? What we have here is a monster, a man so degraded and so much in the grip of his bad passions that he is not even capable of elementary self-preservation. The most ordinary instincts of the self have faded into the fire of his lusts. And yet what he is about is not sensual pleasure either: it is a long, endless string of conquests. The conquest alone matters; if it didn't, he would take advantage of Donna Elvira. This puts him in the most classical category of criminal rape, rape not as any extension of sex or desire, but as an act of power. Don Giovanni is everlastingly seeking to assert himself, to force himself, to make a point, in the service of his omnipotent self-regard and in utter disregard of the effects of his actions.
His conceit has already been mentioned, and in the end it is this, and not any irrepressible sensuality, that lies at the bottom of his actions. He needs to assert himself to show his power over others, and he does that - mostly - by assaulting women, since this also involves the abuse and trampling of the part other men, such as the Commander, Masetto and Don Ottavio, have in their womenfolk. This, it should be pointed out, does not involve sexist notions of possession and property. Da Ponte's attitude to the relationship of the sexes is remarkably advanced: he treats Masetto's jealousy of "his woman" as a half-barbarous and wholly ridiculous attitude, and treats with great respect the mutual respect and affection, the freely undertaken vows, of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. It is rather the case that Don Giovanni's violence assaults the structure of compacts and legitimate mutual expectations of society. His vanity must assert itself by assaulting society at large.
There remains the notion of his courage. Now physical courage was indeed a part of the legend of Don Juan, as seen for instance in Molière's version, but the fact is that Da Ponte has done everything in his power to get rid of it. If the man could once, earlier in his life, be described as brave, what we have now is an unfortunate, over-ripe combination of the reckless, the boastful and the cowardly, reminiscent more of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman than of any of Byron's heroes. We twice hear of his courage - from himself; once as, faced with Ottavio's pistol, he is making like a rabbit, running from his own home and telling us all the while what a bold fellow he is; and once as his bragging is about to be broken for ever by the spirit itself of vengeance. If anything more damning could have been written, I can't think of it. When his victim's stone ghost actually appears before him, Don Giovanni screams, just as Elvira and Leporello had before him, and for a bar or two his voice is reduced to a queasy whisper (Non l'avrei giammai creduto, ma farò quel che potrò), with a hint of wheedling in that quel che potrò; and he recovers his composure only by bullying the unfortunate Leporello (Vanne, dico!).
What we see then is not courage but bragging. The statue traps him by appealing to his notion of his own courage (A torto di viltate tacciato mai sarò), but mere contact with it breaks his mind (Ohimé! Che gelo é questo mai?). What is left then is not courage - he is wiggling and squealing at the ghost, get away from me, vanne lontan da me! - but stubbornly unrepentant obsession. We have seen Don Giovanni at his very worst, a murderer, a rapist, a hypocrite, a liar, a perjurer, a lover of cruelty and bullying; if there ever was a better man somewhere in him, that was a long time before the curtain rose. We know that he has plenty to repent of. Every single sentence in the script has made him look worse. When even his cowardice and physical agony are not enough to break his obsession, that ought to be - and in the intention of the authors, was - the last horror. He even becomes ridiculous, when a bit of the old sneering manner comes back to his lips at a wholly inappropriate time when he calls the statue "you old fool" (vecchio infatuato) as if he was still the brave but foolish old man with whose blood he had befouled the whole street. And indeed, there is a double irony here, for if anyone is infatuato, bewildered by fate, ensorcelled, doomed, it is Don Giovanni himself.
Brave? He is no more brave than Hitler was when, after covering all of Europe with his crimes and perverting every aspect of life, he killed himself rather than face the music. What, at the end of the first act, he had called his courage, was nothing but an unusual swiftness of reaction, not allowing himself to be bewildered by sudden turns of fortune; but even that is, in the main, a reflection of his utter unwillingness to deal with the results of what he had done - the very reverse of moral courage. Faced with the justly angry countenances of his victims, his only thought is - OUTTA HERE! He does not stop to even try an explanation; he does not even try to lie to them. He just dashes out.
Ah, it will be said, but he is not the only one to praise his courage. Yes, indeed; there is one character who is always there to tell us what a courageous spirit the knight has. And who is this impartial witness? Leporello - his servant.
Leporello is a thoroughly central character, on stage nearly the whole time, the source of a constant stream of comments on the action. According to one reviewer (I confess I haven't heard enough performances myself to judge) he is generally interpreted in one of two ways, what he called the "German" view, of Leporello as a degraded, servile reflection of his master; and the "Italian" view - shown, so I gather, in Giulini's recording - that makes him the type of the pert, big-mouthed, truth-telling clown servant, a kind of Figaro in service. The former obviously cannot work except in a caricatural, Expressionistic format, the kind of lightless production favoured by the more humourless modern Germans, removing all the human warmth and compassion, however rough, shown for instance in the prelude to the famous aria Madamina, il catalogo é questo; the latter blatantly misses the humiliations that Figaro would never have put up with, the two-faced behaviour (notably with Donna Elvira), and Leporello's habit of picking up the female crumbs from his master's table.
Certainly Leporello is an undignified, cowardly, sneaking figure; his very name - little hare - confirms it. In Italian, the hare is the type of the coward, and the diminutive adds to the indignity. Da Ponte had chosen the name himself; in earlier versions, Don Juan's servant was called Sganarello, a name implying the opening of jaws (sganasciarsi) either to laugh immoderately or to eat greedily. It was Da Ponte who wanted the cowardice of the unfortunate manservant played up, and he obviously had his reasons to do so: we don't understand Leporello if we don't understand this.
At the same time, we do him an injustice if we don't recognize his better instincts, which are in evidence for much of the script. He is desperate to get out from under "this raving maniac" (questo bel matto), and knows exactly where his master's obsessions will lead them both. He is under no illusions about his master - that is, no illusions except one: he thinks him a brave man. Otherwise, he knows he is a scoundrel (briccone), a rapist and a murderer (sforzar la figlia ed ammazzare il padre), a man without a heart (cuor non ha... anima di bronzo). He reiterates these views from one end of the play to the other, and indeed, when Don Giovanni disguises himself as Leporello, he slips into descriptions of himself just as savage - unworthy knight, scoundrel, honourless man. They sound just right, for he knows what his servant thinks of him.
Don Giovanni, we may be sure, keeps Leporello around purely to enjoy the sense of superiority. It tickles him to hold someone with such views of himself under his thumb. He knows Leporello despises him, but he also knows that he can grind him to powder, not only make him do what he says but make him enjoy it, when and as he pleases. Practically the first thing we see him do to him is break a sworn oath and threaten his life when he protests. This is another charge to his sheet: deliberate and unrepentant perjury (non so di giuramenti, I couldn't care less about oaths). A gentleman's honour is clearly nothing to him, and nor is a gentleman's duty of kindness to inferiors. He loves to torment his servant; he makes him serve a fat feast while hungry, and enjoys the thought of his hunger - as well as of catching him out when Leporello swallows a piece of pheasant. He forces him into a moonlit cemetery, relishing the thought of the unfortunate coward's terror, and at the end of Act One he seems actually quite ready to kill him for mere convenience.
Clearly, this is a sick situation, and no normal man would put up with it; Leporello's attitude to Don Giovanni is not normal. His belief in Don Giovanni's courage is important, but not in the way it is normally taken to be; rather, being himself a hare-minded man, the unfortunate servant is to some extent under the spell of the knight's physical daring and energy. He admires them from a distance, and perhaps without that spell he would leave him. But the main point is the one Leporello himself makes: he is as much a rape victim as anyone. Il padron con prepotenza l'innocenza mi rubò: "my master bullied me out of my innocence" (oddly enough, this phrase sounds more natural in English than in Italian). Making use of his natural cowardice, Don Giovanni is constantly scaring poor Leporello out of his wits. Nor is Leporello in any way wrong to be scared, since Giovanni has already shown himself quite capable of murder. In fact, in other versions of the story, he killed at least four people.
Nothing is more typical of the diseased nature of this relationship than the scene which opens the second act. Leporello professes himself furious, declares himself ready to leave his master, but the question asks itself: if he is so angry (and he has a right to be) about his master’s last stunt, in which he was charged with attempted rape and nearly killed, why does he stand there railing at all? Anyone with any sense would simply have walked off. Instead he stands there, railing at his master - who at first refuses to take him seriously (Ma che ti ho fatto ,che vuoi lasciarmi?). It is exactly like a scene between a married couple; and we become aware that Leporello is looking, not for reasons to leave the Don, but for reasons not to. He wants to rail, but he does not really want to go. He just wants - rather hopelessly, I should think - to be acknowledged by his master as a human being, not as an instrumentum uocale. Don Giovanni finally settles the matter in his own typical way, by offering Leporello a bonus; and Leporello, deliberately misunderstanding his master’s behaviour, calls this a cerimonia, as if some ritual of reparation had been performed. He is psychologically dependent on this monster, and accepts the slightest and most demeaning excuse to stay.
But the theft of innocence has another side: Leporello, once trapped in this disastrous relationship, finds it easy to slip into second-hand Don Giovanni behaviour, pleasing and following his master in all sorts of ways. He admires Donna Elvira and despises the use his master does of her, but, once pushed into Don Giovanni's clothes, he throws himself into the deception with gusto and admits to enjoying it. He collaborates to the full of his not inconsiderable intelligence with his master's plans for Masetto, Zerlina and their friends, though only a few minutes before he had been telling that the life he led was that of a scoundrel.
This puts some common contemporary viewpoints under question. We are unwilling to believe, except in the most extreme cases of psychic weakness, that people may be seduced into changing their behaviour, that they are not always and necessarily the masters of their own personalities and fates. The notion of the "consenting adult" dominates our thinking: where no actual violence is involved, we assume that there is free choice. Under these categories, Don Giovanni is nearly incomprehensible, because its basic point is pretty nearly opposite: it believes that people may easily be tempted into unacceptable behaviour. Leporello slips into behaviour he knows to be despicable because of the overpowering influence of his master. Elvira comes to believe the lies of the man she believes to be Don Giovanni, despite all her experience; Zerlina is nearly taken, for all that she knows that knights are not always honourable with women, because at the decisive moment Don Giovanni simply dazzles and overpowers her. Each of them has a different cause to fall: Leporello feels fascinated fear, Zerlina is dazzled and perhaps struck with a touch of temporal ambition (though she herself never says anything of the sort: it is Don Giovanni who keeps talking of rank and wealth); Elvira is wretchedly in love.
In the case of Zerlina, the distance from contemporary views is absolute. She cannot be understood unless we measure the strength or weakness of a personality by its ability to refuse temptation however glitzy, however glittering, however glamorous. She says in so many words that she is not strong enough (non son più forte) to resist Don Giovanni. She is not a "consenting adult", but a comparatively weak personality being overwhelmed by a more focused, more obsessional, and - to that extent, in that context - a stronger one. The celebrated duet Là ci darem la mano is nothing else than a velvet-gloved and fortunately unconsummated rape. That he is dazzling a poor little peasant girl with his aristocratic glamour and wealth does not make it any less an act of violence; violence moral rather than material, but violence none the less. Zerlina's will is not unclear: even as she is being sucked into the whirlwind of Don Giovanni's greedy and implacable mind, she is still thinking of Masetto and her duty to him. She is not convinced, but overwhelmed. This is clean out of the whole contemporary view of sex: since nobody today believes that sex is a temptation to be resisted, the notion of being strong enough to resist it is incomprehensible. Even so, the tempter must resort to outright lies even to overwhelm her: he makes a promise of honourable marriage which he has not the slightest intention of keeping. But for the lucky chance meeting with Donna Elvira, we know that, within twenty minutes, the pretty little summerhouse (casinetto) to which he was taking her would have seen her left there alone like a discarded candy wrapper, violated, devastated, and perhaps pregnant. I don't care how it is phrased: physical or not, this is violence, and any production which does not make Là ci darem la mano heavy with menace and suggestion simply hasn't understood what's going on.
It's not even the case that Zerlina is, in absolute terms, weak: she is a clear-headed and intelligent young woman, quite sharp enough to deal with the normal events and problems of ordinary life. Masetto's grumble - guarda un pò come seppe questa strega sedurmi! Siamo pur noi i deboli di testa - is an absolute married-man classic, and shows that Zerlina is a thoroughly skilful practitioner of normal married life. She has no desire to break it up, or even to dilute it by bedding anyone else behind her husband's back; her arias Batti, batti, o bel Masetto and Vedrai carino, se sei buonino are among the frankest outbursts of sensuality proper, unashamed, in the whole of world opera, and show that, whatever other problems there may be in their relationship, Masetto is quite man enough to satisfy her. (This surely has to do with Mozart's own quite happy and - ahem! - satisfying marriage.) Her will, and even her sensuality, do not need Don Giovanni; and indeed, when she is in a position to make an adult's choice, understanding what was being offered to her, she rejects it with disgust and horror; having once seen through the monster, she does everything in her power to escape him.
She does not have the answer to someone like him. She is simply too sane and normal to understand a character as profoundly unbalanced, a will as wholly perverted, as Don Giovanni's; as indeed is everyone else. Don Giovanni's great advantage throughout the play is that nobody can, at first, bring him or herself to believe that he would act with quite the brutality and hypocrisy that he does; their notions, even their experience, of bad behaviour, fall short of what he is capable of. From the beginning, we have seen him commit rape, murder, conscious oath-breaking, and the most heartless attempt upon an unknown young woman - and then we have met, wrapped up in the single person of Donna Elvira, nearly all the wrongs that can be heaped upon a single person. There is clearly nothing that this man will not do. How could ordinary decent citizens such as Anna, Ottavio and Zerlina imagine that a neighbour could do such things?
If they could, without valid evidence, conceive such evil of a neighbour, there would be something wrong with them; and indeed the one person, Masetto, who is suspicious of the knight from the beginning, is not diagnosed as a sharp fellow, but as a pathologically suspicious boor in need of a lesson. If he is right in seeing the knight as a villain, he might just as viciously have objected to a genuinely warm-hearted chance acquaintance with no ulterior motives, and his public scene to Zerlina is as vulgar and charmless a performance as any of us could wish not to see (faccia il nostro cavaliero cavaliera ancora te!), calling the woman he has just married a slut in front of the whole marriage party: something which demeans not only her, but himself as well. (For if she was the tart he makes her, it would not say much for him, that he married her.) Elvira, Anna and Ottavio, knowing nothing of Zerlina, trust her implicitly, and she deserves their trust; Masetto, who must have known her for years, does not trust her at all, and puts her and himself into terrible danger - of rape if not of death - to put her fidelity to the test. Only the arrival of Don Ottavio gets Zerlina and him out of the hole he has dug for them both.
Ottavio is a most ill-used character, and generations of producers, conductors and singers deserve some extra time in Purgatory as reparation to his good name. The modern view is at a loss what to do with him, and blame him for their own insensitivity: evidently, the notion of a character who wants some evidence before he will believe a friend guilty of rape and murder is quite incomprehensible to our late-romantics. The tenor voice given him tends to be soft and feminine, which sounds especially incongruous when he promises "death and slaughter" (stragi e morti). In the mouth of the average Don Ottavio, this sounds ridiculous, even though, had the statue of the Commander not forestalled him, he would have delivered exactly what he promised: the body of Don Giovanni, and probably of Leporello as well. To them, one supposes, a hero would have to go tearing off after Don Giovanni with drawn sword the moment he heard his betrothed charge him with murder.
Masetto does just that; and his treatment shows what Da Ponte thought of hot-headed action heroes. In this very calculated libretto, Masetto and Ottavio both suffer from the same offence; but when Masetto has conclusive evidence of the knight's villainy, his reaction is not to go the authorities, like Ottavio, but to gather a lynch mob and go look for him, to beat him to death with no warrant. With typical devilry, Don Giovanni turns the mob to beating any courting gentleman unfortunate enough to be found in fashionable dress, serenading his belle in the moonlight (and, as he points out, it's a beautiful night, that seems made on purpose to go courting - and therefore Masetto's friends are bound to find a few); but his odious trick only plays up the fact that this kind of assault on completely innocent persons is the most probable result of lynch law. All Masetto achieves, apart from ruining the night of several innocent lovers, is to be outsmarted by his enemy and severely beaten. Ottavio, on the other hand, is eminently effective: it takes a near-miracle for Don Giovanni to escape him the first time, and only the supernatural forestalls him in the end.
The truth is that Mozart has adhered strictly to operatic convention and given the tenor the part of the hero. That he is given no swaggering arie (unlike for instance Pamino after his initiation into water and fire, in The Magic Flute) does nothing to diminish his heroism. In the fog of violence, rape, murder and supernatural revenge that pervades the play, he is the one luminous figure. For him, the events of the play are a series of frightful shocks: he himself holds friendship sacred (il sacro manto dell'amicizia) and the notion that someone so close to them, a friend and a social equal, apparently the first person he and Anna resort to, should have abused their friendship so atrociously, is, at first, beyond him. But he adapts, he weathers the storm. He is a thoroughly good man, with none of the ridiculous and unpleasant impulses of violence and jealousy that mar the figure of Masetto, and, one by one, all the victims of Don Giovanni end up resorting to him. Don Giovanni is beyond the grasp of any single avenger; but when so many of his outraged victims come together, Ottavio, without doing anything to promote himself (how unlike his boastful enemy!), turns out to be their natural leader.
His part should be sung with controlled force. As Anna tells him of her near-rape, he is seething, constantly breaking in, not - as I have heard him sung - with feminine squeals, but with uncontrollable outrage. As he says, his peace depends on her: he feels her grief and disgust as if they had happened to him, with a sympathetic understanding shown by no other character in the play. But as her account ends, he draws back. He is not the man, like Masetto, to go storming off to kill someone on a suspicion: he wants more evidence than the fleeting impression of a weary and upset woman. And this in spite of the fact that he is very, very much in love with her, so much so that he is soon to forget social convention and ask Anna to marry him on the spot - which, as she points out, is crazy talk: marry her on her father's grave? He can trust her: give her a year for mourning, and then she will be his for ever. And once again, Ottavio holds himself back and accepts sense, even though it hurts.
Unlike Don Giovanni, he is truly brave: he enters his enemy's lair in disguise to find evidence of his criminality, takes swift and decisive action even in the middle of a crowd, saves Zerlina from violent rape at some personal danger, and forces the villain to flee his own home. Sensibly, he does not, like the unfortunate Commander, try his luck with swords: he simply claps a gun to Don Giovanni's head. This deprives us of heroic swordplay, but shows that Ottavio had come ready to deal with the matter in imperious and conclusive fashion. In every way, Ottavio is the voice of reason: ready to listen but slow to condemn, neither rejecting out of hand the notion that a knight could be a rapist and murderer, nor accepting it without proof, taking action in a swift and sensible manner, not risking his own life uselessly, yet ready to take any risk to protect the innocent - even facing down a notorious murderer in his own home.
It may be said, if Ottavio is such an admirable character, why is his share in the action so secondary? The answer is, for the same reason why Malcolm plays a comparatively secondary role in Macbeth: that the motive power of the action is the protagonist's evil. What sets everything in motion, what governs the story from one end to the other, is Giovanni's unexhausted thirst for more and more self-aggrandisement, more and more cruel fun, more and more violence. Ottavio is simply one of the many people whose fiancées he has abused and raped; it's his bad luck that Ottavio is a man of uncommon clarity and action, but who knows how many other fine, upright, loyal people's trust he has abused in his travels through Europe. In fact, the dramatic structure is remarkably like Macbeth, not only in being about evil, but in that the main character is slain not by the hero - Malcolm, Ottavio - but by someone, or something, else, connected one way of another to the family ties the villain trampled. If Macduff is not, like the Statue, a supernatural being, he is at least a man not born of woman; if he is not the ghost of a victim, he is the next best thing - the single survivor of a slaughtered family, almost the ghost of his own family. This emphasizes that the downfall of evil is not in the last analysis the work of rebellious and embattled good, though that has its share, but of the protagonist himself. It is the dynamic of King Macbeth and Don Giovanni Tenorio's own stories that eventually bring them face to face with the results of their actions.
If Don Giovanni does not face a whole nation in revolt against him, it is because he is no king: but in the number of his enemies, we recognize the whole of freeborn society, gathered together by his evil - the free churls Masetto and Zerlina (Masetto is a Villan d'onore, an honourable peasant); the aristocratic Ottavio and Anna; and, in the character of Elvira, even a shadow of the Church - it was universally known that she eventually became a nun. But it is completely unwarranted to see in this anything like a warrant to believe that, because all of society is against him, therefore there must have been something to be said for him: not unless the rebellion against tyranny, rape and violence is wrong. Don Giovanni is a bandit, in the etymological meaning of the word - a banished man, a man whose violence and untrustworthiness have made him an alien to human society. No production can show any understanding of the script unless it brings out, with the greatest possible force, the fact that the very presence of Don Giovanni is dangerous, that he should be as uncomfortable and threatening a neighbour as a member of the Mafia or the SS. Unless Don Giovanni Tenorio embodies threat, the whole libretto doesn't make sense.
Throughout, Da Ponte, though writing in the stilted and artificial Italian of the eighteenth century (particularly notable any time Donna Elvira speaks), shows both brilliant plotting ability and remarkable psychological subtlety. It is hard to see what more he and Mozart could have done to drive their message home. That their work is so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented does not speak well for our age.
Well, yesterday I took in hand the essay on the Longobard legend of Godan/Odin that had been laying half-completed in my computer for months. I have the ideas down pretty clearly, but to cast it into an intelligible shape and arrange the evidence and reasoning properly is proving the Devil's own business, mainly because it asks to be taken in two or three different directions - Indo-European comparison and specifics of the Germanic group of cultures, and perhaps local Longobard facts. In the course of this, I also had a frightful wrestling match with a piece of Carolingian Latin writing called the Historia Langobardorum of the Codex Gothanus. My Latin is only so-so, and, in so far as it is there at all, it is Classical; certainly not up to the kind of idiom used by this Carolingian-era writer, who uses verbs and even prepositions unknown to most Latin dictionaries - DEINTER, anyone? And all the Dark Age Latin I have handled so far has been Insular (British and Irish), which I am pretty sure represents a different kind of "dialect" from that of the author of the Codex Gothanus, who seems to have been an Italian transplanted in Fulda, Germany. Fun for all the family, this... And at the end, I found that the code actually had rather little to tell me about Longobard legend. Whoopee.
Today I finally completed my Internet connection, which means that I no longer have to go to the local library. I also completed the revision of a very old paper on the Crusades whose theory I still subscribe to, but which badly needed some work. I will publish it here in the next few days. Meanwhile, today I give an essay on Mozart's great opera DON GIOVANNI and its modern mishandling.
RAPE AND ROMANTICISM - by F.P.Barbieri
Mozart's Don Giovanni is one of the greatest operas ever composed, and practically every music lover alive knows it well. And yet the evidence is that singers, producers and conductors, let alone the public, simply do not understand what the work is about - even though its moral is by no means unclear.
This misunderstanding has taken more than one form. In the romantic nineteenth century people used to treat it as a comic opera; it was felt that the devilry, out of keeping as it was with the Romantic taste for the diabolic, was not to be taken seriously. More recently, though conductors and critics seem to have cottoned on to it that this is a serious work, an equally wrong-headed view has taken its place - that the protagonist is some sort of metaphysical hero in rebellion against the cosmos - an oddly nineteenth-century, Byronic view that the nineteenth century seems not to have thought of. I actually saw the expression "metaphysical heroism" used in a recent newspaper review, with no explanation or expansion, for all the world as if the thing was self-evident; it seems to be the orthodox view. (One is reminded of the similarly wrong-headed orthodoxy that Othello has something to do with colonialism.)
The curious thing about this Don Giovanni-olatry is that the type of Don Giovanni is today the most universal object of hatred and social contempt conceivable. Any contemporary who wrote a story about someone like him would only cast him as the villain; any person discovered, in real life, to behave like him, would be thrown into jail for life with no parole, to the applause of all the media whose reviewers still hymn the "metaphysical courage" of Da Ponte's character. To be blunt about it: Don Giovanni Tenorio is a serial rapist. He is a serial rapist and nothing else. All he is concerned with is to force his way into as many women as possible; when he invites a crowd of peasant lads and girls into his own house, it is with the stated purpose of adding at least ten notches to his count. He is simply incapable of seeing a woman, any woman, even an old crone (though young virgins, we are told, are his chief delight) without thinking of penetration.
When he has once had them, he is done; he does not even think of coming back for seconds. We should be struck by the way in which he does not even try to take advantage a second time of Donna Elvira, who is unhappily in love with him and takes very little effort to be talked into believing what she should know to be lies. He could have had her as many times as he wanted; he could even, I think, have got her to consent and take some sort of part, active or passive, in his lifestyle; so desperately does she need him. Instead, he pushes her off on his servant Leporello, as a thing to be got rid of and out of the way as fast as possible. The conquest, if not the rape, is the only thing that matters.
He is clearly unbalanced. All his behaviour in the play proves it: he is pathologically lacking in foresight, even to the extent of going back to his own house to feast in comfort after having been driven from it by people who had every reason to believe him guilty of the murder of the father of one of them. Any moderately sane man, even a criminal, would have taken flight, or alternatively plotted to kill his enemies to insure his own safety; not he. His mind is so much on rape and sex that he is simply incapable of thinking of anything else.
It may also be that he regards himself as invulnerable. Certainly his conceit is enormous. He does think of himself as of an uncommon being. The emphasis in his dinner scene, once he has returned home, is not so much on sensual enjoyment and self-indulgence, as on his own congratulations on his good taste. He regards himself as a master of taste in food, wine and music; when his servant is caught stealing some food, he wiggles out of it by flattering his master's taste - "your chef is so excellent, sir, I couldn't resist a bite".
We should not take this at face value: in a freer moment, Leporello had commented rather on his uncouth greed (barbaro appetito) - very unbecoming, we should think, a gentleman of taste and leisure - and Donna Elvira, a cultivated lady, had called the whole scene "foully stinking and horrible". The setting is that of a formal and luxurious dinner party, yet he is dining alone, and delighting in it. A dinner party, after all, would require him to put on some manners! He guzzles down food and wine in a completely abandoned manner, and we may doubt whether his fare is really as fine as he fancies it. Earlier in the play, he had started a party with sweets and chocolate; a poor witness to his taste. That was for a crowd of peasants, whose palates he perhaps regarded as not very discriminating; but it was two of them, Zerlina and Masetto, who remarked on the odd and unpleasant sweet start of the dinner (troppo dolce comincia la cena, in amaro potria terminar).
Da Ponte does not take the trouble to give a reason or an explanation for Don Giovanni's behaviour. This shows sound artistic judgement; not only does the play have no time for it, but an explanation in terms of cause and effect would spoil the artistic effect of Don Giovanni's personality. The man is incapable of looking at himself, let alone explaining his actions; before the curtain ever rises, he has left the rational faculty behind. He is already, as we see him, a moral ruin. The only time he is asked to give an account of his behaviour, he reacts with a disgusting and pathetic joke: he loves, he says, all women at once, and cannot stop to only one. After the murder and attempted rape we have seen, this sort of thing can only be described as insensitive trash. It is genuinely barbarous. It sounds even worse in Italian: in that language, to care for is said to want good to (voler bene a) and the very notion of Don Giovanni wanting any good for his victims is, I must say, revolting. The fact that it seems to be proffered in perfect seriousness only shows that he has lost any sense of reality. Of course, he is joking; he just no longer realizes that a cheap joke is not a sufficient answer to the question.
How much more do we have to witness before we realize that the notion of metaphysical heroism is as out of place here as that of his own love and benevolence for all women? What we have here is a monster, a man so degraded and so much in the grip of his bad passions that he is not even capable of elementary self-preservation. The most ordinary instincts of the self have faded into the fire of his lusts. And yet what he is about is not sensual pleasure either: it is a long, endless string of conquests. The conquest alone matters; if it didn't, he would take advantage of Donna Elvira. This puts him in the most classical category of criminal rape, rape not as any extension of sex or desire, but as an act of power. Don Giovanni is everlastingly seeking to assert himself, to force himself, to make a point, in the service of his omnipotent self-regard and in utter disregard of the effects of his actions.
His conceit has already been mentioned, and in the end it is this, and not any irrepressible sensuality, that lies at the bottom of his actions. He needs to assert himself to show his power over others, and he does that - mostly - by assaulting women, since this also involves the abuse and trampling of the part other men, such as the Commander, Masetto and Don Ottavio, have in their womenfolk. This, it should be pointed out, does not involve sexist notions of possession and property. Da Ponte's attitude to the relationship of the sexes is remarkably advanced: he treats Masetto's jealousy of "his woman" as a half-barbarous and wholly ridiculous attitude, and treats with great respect the mutual respect and affection, the freely undertaken vows, of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. It is rather the case that Don Giovanni's violence assaults the structure of compacts and legitimate mutual expectations of society. His vanity must assert itself by assaulting society at large.
There remains the notion of his courage. Now physical courage was indeed a part of the legend of Don Juan, as seen for instance in Molière's version, but the fact is that Da Ponte has done everything in his power to get rid of it. If the man could once, earlier in his life, be described as brave, what we have now is an unfortunate, over-ripe combination of the reckless, the boastful and the cowardly, reminiscent more of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman than of any of Byron's heroes. We twice hear of his courage - from himself; once as, faced with Ottavio's pistol, he is making like a rabbit, running from his own home and telling us all the while what a bold fellow he is; and once as his bragging is about to be broken for ever by the spirit itself of vengeance. If anything more damning could have been written, I can't think of it. When his victim's stone ghost actually appears before him, Don Giovanni screams, just as Elvira and Leporello had before him, and for a bar or two his voice is reduced to a queasy whisper (Non l'avrei giammai creduto, ma farò quel che potrò), with a hint of wheedling in that quel che potrò; and he recovers his composure only by bullying the unfortunate Leporello (Vanne, dico!).
What we see then is not courage but bragging. The statue traps him by appealing to his notion of his own courage (A torto di viltate tacciato mai sarò), but mere contact with it breaks his mind (Ohimé! Che gelo é questo mai?). What is left then is not courage - he is wiggling and squealing at the ghost, get away from me, vanne lontan da me! - but stubbornly unrepentant obsession. We have seen Don Giovanni at his very worst, a murderer, a rapist, a hypocrite, a liar, a perjurer, a lover of cruelty and bullying; if there ever was a better man somewhere in him, that was a long time before the curtain rose. We know that he has plenty to repent of. Every single sentence in the script has made him look worse. When even his cowardice and physical agony are not enough to break his obsession, that ought to be - and in the intention of the authors, was - the last horror. He even becomes ridiculous, when a bit of the old sneering manner comes back to his lips at a wholly inappropriate time when he calls the statue "you old fool" (vecchio infatuato) as if he was still the brave but foolish old man with whose blood he had befouled the whole street. And indeed, there is a double irony here, for if anyone is infatuato, bewildered by fate, ensorcelled, doomed, it is Don Giovanni himself.
Brave? He is no more brave than Hitler was when, after covering all of Europe with his crimes and perverting every aspect of life, he killed himself rather than face the music. What, at the end of the first act, he had called his courage, was nothing but an unusual swiftness of reaction, not allowing himself to be bewildered by sudden turns of fortune; but even that is, in the main, a reflection of his utter unwillingness to deal with the results of what he had done - the very reverse of moral courage. Faced with the justly angry countenances of his victims, his only thought is - OUTTA HERE! He does not stop to even try an explanation; he does not even try to lie to them. He just dashes out.
Ah, it will be said, but he is not the only one to praise his courage. Yes, indeed; there is one character who is always there to tell us what a courageous spirit the knight has. And who is this impartial witness? Leporello - his servant.
Leporello is a thoroughly central character, on stage nearly the whole time, the source of a constant stream of comments on the action. According to one reviewer (I confess I haven't heard enough performances myself to judge) he is generally interpreted in one of two ways, what he called the "German" view, of Leporello as a degraded, servile reflection of his master; and the "Italian" view - shown, so I gather, in Giulini's recording - that makes him the type of the pert, big-mouthed, truth-telling clown servant, a kind of Figaro in service. The former obviously cannot work except in a caricatural, Expressionistic format, the kind of lightless production favoured by the more humourless modern Germans, removing all the human warmth and compassion, however rough, shown for instance in the prelude to the famous aria Madamina, il catalogo é questo; the latter blatantly misses the humiliations that Figaro would never have put up with, the two-faced behaviour (notably with Donna Elvira), and Leporello's habit of picking up the female crumbs from his master's table.
Certainly Leporello is an undignified, cowardly, sneaking figure; his very name - little hare - confirms it. In Italian, the hare is the type of the coward, and the diminutive adds to the indignity. Da Ponte had chosen the name himself; in earlier versions, Don Juan's servant was called Sganarello, a name implying the opening of jaws (sganasciarsi) either to laugh immoderately or to eat greedily. It was Da Ponte who wanted the cowardice of the unfortunate manservant played up, and he obviously had his reasons to do so: we don't understand Leporello if we don't understand this.
At the same time, we do him an injustice if we don't recognize his better instincts, which are in evidence for much of the script. He is desperate to get out from under "this raving maniac" (questo bel matto), and knows exactly where his master's obsessions will lead them both. He is under no illusions about his master - that is, no illusions except one: he thinks him a brave man. Otherwise, he knows he is a scoundrel (briccone), a rapist and a murderer (sforzar la figlia ed ammazzare il padre), a man without a heart (cuor non ha... anima di bronzo). He reiterates these views from one end of the play to the other, and indeed, when Don Giovanni disguises himself as Leporello, he slips into descriptions of himself just as savage - unworthy knight, scoundrel, honourless man. They sound just right, for he knows what his servant thinks of him.
Don Giovanni, we may be sure, keeps Leporello around purely to enjoy the sense of superiority. It tickles him to hold someone with such views of himself under his thumb. He knows Leporello despises him, but he also knows that he can grind him to powder, not only make him do what he says but make him enjoy it, when and as he pleases. Practically the first thing we see him do to him is break a sworn oath and threaten his life when he protests. This is another charge to his sheet: deliberate and unrepentant perjury (non so di giuramenti, I couldn't care less about oaths). A gentleman's honour is clearly nothing to him, and nor is a gentleman's duty of kindness to inferiors. He loves to torment his servant; he makes him serve a fat feast while hungry, and enjoys the thought of his hunger - as well as of catching him out when Leporello swallows a piece of pheasant. He forces him into a moonlit cemetery, relishing the thought of the unfortunate coward's terror, and at the end of Act One he seems actually quite ready to kill him for mere convenience.
Clearly, this is a sick situation, and no normal man would put up with it; Leporello's attitude to Don Giovanni is not normal. His belief in Don Giovanni's courage is important, but not in the way it is normally taken to be; rather, being himself a hare-minded man, the unfortunate servant is to some extent under the spell of the knight's physical daring and energy. He admires them from a distance, and perhaps without that spell he would leave him. But the main point is the one Leporello himself makes: he is as much a rape victim as anyone. Il padron con prepotenza l'innocenza mi rubò: "my master bullied me out of my innocence" (oddly enough, this phrase sounds more natural in English than in Italian). Making use of his natural cowardice, Don Giovanni is constantly scaring poor Leporello out of his wits. Nor is Leporello in any way wrong to be scared, since Giovanni has already shown himself quite capable of murder. In fact, in other versions of the story, he killed at least four people.
Nothing is more typical of the diseased nature of this relationship than the scene which opens the second act. Leporello professes himself furious, declares himself ready to leave his master, but the question asks itself: if he is so angry (and he has a right to be) about his master’s last stunt, in which he was charged with attempted rape and nearly killed, why does he stand there railing at all? Anyone with any sense would simply have walked off. Instead he stands there, railing at his master - who at first refuses to take him seriously (Ma che ti ho fatto ,che vuoi lasciarmi?). It is exactly like a scene between a married couple; and we become aware that Leporello is looking, not for reasons to leave the Don, but for reasons not to. He wants to rail, but he does not really want to go. He just wants - rather hopelessly, I should think - to be acknowledged by his master as a human being, not as an instrumentum uocale. Don Giovanni finally settles the matter in his own typical way, by offering Leporello a bonus; and Leporello, deliberately misunderstanding his master’s behaviour, calls this a cerimonia, as if some ritual of reparation had been performed. He is psychologically dependent on this monster, and accepts the slightest and most demeaning excuse to stay.
But the theft of innocence has another side: Leporello, once trapped in this disastrous relationship, finds it easy to slip into second-hand Don Giovanni behaviour, pleasing and following his master in all sorts of ways. He admires Donna Elvira and despises the use his master does of her, but, once pushed into Don Giovanni's clothes, he throws himself into the deception with gusto and admits to enjoying it. He collaborates to the full of his not inconsiderable intelligence with his master's plans for Masetto, Zerlina and their friends, though only a few minutes before he had been telling that the life he led was that of a scoundrel.
This puts some common contemporary viewpoints under question. We are unwilling to believe, except in the most extreme cases of psychic weakness, that people may be seduced into changing their behaviour, that they are not always and necessarily the masters of their own personalities and fates. The notion of the "consenting adult" dominates our thinking: where no actual violence is involved, we assume that there is free choice. Under these categories, Don Giovanni is nearly incomprehensible, because its basic point is pretty nearly opposite: it believes that people may easily be tempted into unacceptable behaviour. Leporello slips into behaviour he knows to be despicable because of the overpowering influence of his master. Elvira comes to believe the lies of the man she believes to be Don Giovanni, despite all her experience; Zerlina is nearly taken, for all that she knows that knights are not always honourable with women, because at the decisive moment Don Giovanni simply dazzles and overpowers her. Each of them has a different cause to fall: Leporello feels fascinated fear, Zerlina is dazzled and perhaps struck with a touch of temporal ambition (though she herself never says anything of the sort: it is Don Giovanni who keeps talking of rank and wealth); Elvira is wretchedly in love.
In the case of Zerlina, the distance from contemporary views is absolute. She cannot be understood unless we measure the strength or weakness of a personality by its ability to refuse temptation however glitzy, however glittering, however glamorous. She says in so many words that she is not strong enough (non son più forte) to resist Don Giovanni. She is not a "consenting adult", but a comparatively weak personality being overwhelmed by a more focused, more obsessional, and - to that extent, in that context - a stronger one. The celebrated duet Là ci darem la mano is nothing else than a velvet-gloved and fortunately unconsummated rape. That he is dazzling a poor little peasant girl with his aristocratic glamour and wealth does not make it any less an act of violence; violence moral rather than material, but violence none the less. Zerlina's will is not unclear: even as she is being sucked into the whirlwind of Don Giovanni's greedy and implacable mind, she is still thinking of Masetto and her duty to him. She is not convinced, but overwhelmed. This is clean out of the whole contemporary view of sex: since nobody today believes that sex is a temptation to be resisted, the notion of being strong enough to resist it is incomprehensible. Even so, the tempter must resort to outright lies even to overwhelm her: he makes a promise of honourable marriage which he has not the slightest intention of keeping. But for the lucky chance meeting with Donna Elvira, we know that, within twenty minutes, the pretty little summerhouse (casinetto) to which he was taking her would have seen her left there alone like a discarded candy wrapper, violated, devastated, and perhaps pregnant. I don't care how it is phrased: physical or not, this is violence, and any production which does not make Là ci darem la mano heavy with menace and suggestion simply hasn't understood what's going on.
It's not even the case that Zerlina is, in absolute terms, weak: she is a clear-headed and intelligent young woman, quite sharp enough to deal with the normal events and problems of ordinary life. Masetto's grumble - guarda un pò come seppe questa strega sedurmi! Siamo pur noi i deboli di testa - is an absolute married-man classic, and shows that Zerlina is a thoroughly skilful practitioner of normal married life. She has no desire to break it up, or even to dilute it by bedding anyone else behind her husband's back; her arias Batti, batti, o bel Masetto and Vedrai carino, se sei buonino are among the frankest outbursts of sensuality proper, unashamed, in the whole of world opera, and show that, whatever other problems there may be in their relationship, Masetto is quite man enough to satisfy her. (This surely has to do with Mozart's own quite happy and - ahem! - satisfying marriage.) Her will, and even her sensuality, do not need Don Giovanni; and indeed, when she is in a position to make an adult's choice, understanding what was being offered to her, she rejects it with disgust and horror; having once seen through the monster, she does everything in her power to escape him.
She does not have the answer to someone like him. She is simply too sane and normal to understand a character as profoundly unbalanced, a will as wholly perverted, as Don Giovanni's; as indeed is everyone else. Don Giovanni's great advantage throughout the play is that nobody can, at first, bring him or herself to believe that he would act with quite the brutality and hypocrisy that he does; their notions, even their experience, of bad behaviour, fall short of what he is capable of. From the beginning, we have seen him commit rape, murder, conscious oath-breaking, and the most heartless attempt upon an unknown young woman - and then we have met, wrapped up in the single person of Donna Elvira, nearly all the wrongs that can be heaped upon a single person. There is clearly nothing that this man will not do. How could ordinary decent citizens such as Anna, Ottavio and Zerlina imagine that a neighbour could do such things?
If they could, without valid evidence, conceive such evil of a neighbour, there would be something wrong with them; and indeed the one person, Masetto, who is suspicious of the knight from the beginning, is not diagnosed as a sharp fellow, but as a pathologically suspicious boor in need of a lesson. If he is right in seeing the knight as a villain, he might just as viciously have objected to a genuinely warm-hearted chance acquaintance with no ulterior motives, and his public scene to Zerlina is as vulgar and charmless a performance as any of us could wish not to see (faccia il nostro cavaliero cavaliera ancora te!), calling the woman he has just married a slut in front of the whole marriage party: something which demeans not only her, but himself as well. (For if she was the tart he makes her, it would not say much for him, that he married her.) Elvira, Anna and Ottavio, knowing nothing of Zerlina, trust her implicitly, and she deserves their trust; Masetto, who must have known her for years, does not trust her at all, and puts her and himself into terrible danger - of rape if not of death - to put her fidelity to the test. Only the arrival of Don Ottavio gets Zerlina and him out of the hole he has dug for them both.
Ottavio is a most ill-used character, and generations of producers, conductors and singers deserve some extra time in Purgatory as reparation to his good name. The modern view is at a loss what to do with him, and blame him for their own insensitivity: evidently, the notion of a character who wants some evidence before he will believe a friend guilty of rape and murder is quite incomprehensible to our late-romantics. The tenor voice given him tends to be soft and feminine, which sounds especially incongruous when he promises "death and slaughter" (stragi e morti). In the mouth of the average Don Ottavio, this sounds ridiculous, even though, had the statue of the Commander not forestalled him, he would have delivered exactly what he promised: the body of Don Giovanni, and probably of Leporello as well. To them, one supposes, a hero would have to go tearing off after Don Giovanni with drawn sword the moment he heard his betrothed charge him with murder.
Masetto does just that; and his treatment shows what Da Ponte thought of hot-headed action heroes. In this very calculated libretto, Masetto and Ottavio both suffer from the same offence; but when Masetto has conclusive evidence of the knight's villainy, his reaction is not to go the authorities, like Ottavio, but to gather a lynch mob and go look for him, to beat him to death with no warrant. With typical devilry, Don Giovanni turns the mob to beating any courting gentleman unfortunate enough to be found in fashionable dress, serenading his belle in the moonlight (and, as he points out, it's a beautiful night, that seems made on purpose to go courting - and therefore Masetto's friends are bound to find a few); but his odious trick only plays up the fact that this kind of assault on completely innocent persons is the most probable result of lynch law. All Masetto achieves, apart from ruining the night of several innocent lovers, is to be outsmarted by his enemy and severely beaten. Ottavio, on the other hand, is eminently effective: it takes a near-miracle for Don Giovanni to escape him the first time, and only the supernatural forestalls him in the end.
The truth is that Mozart has adhered strictly to operatic convention and given the tenor the part of the hero. That he is given no swaggering arie (unlike for instance Pamino after his initiation into water and fire, in The Magic Flute) does nothing to diminish his heroism. In the fog of violence, rape, murder and supernatural revenge that pervades the play, he is the one luminous figure. For him, the events of the play are a series of frightful shocks: he himself holds friendship sacred (il sacro manto dell'amicizia) and the notion that someone so close to them, a friend and a social equal, apparently the first person he and Anna resort to, should have abused their friendship so atrociously, is, at first, beyond him. But he adapts, he weathers the storm. He is a thoroughly good man, with none of the ridiculous and unpleasant impulses of violence and jealousy that mar the figure of Masetto, and, one by one, all the victims of Don Giovanni end up resorting to him. Don Giovanni is beyond the grasp of any single avenger; but when so many of his outraged victims come together, Ottavio, without doing anything to promote himself (how unlike his boastful enemy!), turns out to be their natural leader.
His part should be sung with controlled force. As Anna tells him of her near-rape, he is seething, constantly breaking in, not - as I have heard him sung - with feminine squeals, but with uncontrollable outrage. As he says, his peace depends on her: he feels her grief and disgust as if they had happened to him, with a sympathetic understanding shown by no other character in the play. But as her account ends, he draws back. He is not the man, like Masetto, to go storming off to kill someone on a suspicion: he wants more evidence than the fleeting impression of a weary and upset woman. And this in spite of the fact that he is very, very much in love with her, so much so that he is soon to forget social convention and ask Anna to marry him on the spot - which, as she points out, is crazy talk: marry her on her father's grave? He can trust her: give her a year for mourning, and then she will be his for ever. And once again, Ottavio holds himself back and accepts sense, even though it hurts.
Unlike Don Giovanni, he is truly brave: he enters his enemy's lair in disguise to find evidence of his criminality, takes swift and decisive action even in the middle of a crowd, saves Zerlina from violent rape at some personal danger, and forces the villain to flee his own home. Sensibly, he does not, like the unfortunate Commander, try his luck with swords: he simply claps a gun to Don Giovanni's head. This deprives us of heroic swordplay, but shows that Ottavio had come ready to deal with the matter in imperious and conclusive fashion. In every way, Ottavio is the voice of reason: ready to listen but slow to condemn, neither rejecting out of hand the notion that a knight could be a rapist and murderer, nor accepting it without proof, taking action in a swift and sensible manner, not risking his own life uselessly, yet ready to take any risk to protect the innocent - even facing down a notorious murderer in his own home.
It may be said, if Ottavio is such an admirable character, why is his share in the action so secondary? The answer is, for the same reason why Malcolm plays a comparatively secondary role in Macbeth: that the motive power of the action is the protagonist's evil. What sets everything in motion, what governs the story from one end to the other, is Giovanni's unexhausted thirst for more and more self-aggrandisement, more and more cruel fun, more and more violence. Ottavio is simply one of the many people whose fiancées he has abused and raped; it's his bad luck that Ottavio is a man of uncommon clarity and action, but who knows how many other fine, upright, loyal people's trust he has abused in his travels through Europe. In fact, the dramatic structure is remarkably like Macbeth, not only in being about evil, but in that the main character is slain not by the hero - Malcolm, Ottavio - but by someone, or something, else, connected one way of another to the family ties the villain trampled. If Macduff is not, like the Statue, a supernatural being, he is at least a man not born of woman; if he is not the ghost of a victim, he is the next best thing - the single survivor of a slaughtered family, almost the ghost of his own family. This emphasizes that the downfall of evil is not in the last analysis the work of rebellious and embattled good, though that has its share, but of the protagonist himself. It is the dynamic of King Macbeth and Don Giovanni Tenorio's own stories that eventually bring them face to face with the results of their actions.
If Don Giovanni does not face a whole nation in revolt against him, it is because he is no king: but in the number of his enemies, we recognize the whole of freeborn society, gathered together by his evil - the free churls Masetto and Zerlina (Masetto is a Villan d'onore, an honourable peasant); the aristocratic Ottavio and Anna; and, in the character of Elvira, even a shadow of the Church - it was universally known that she eventually became a nun. But it is completely unwarranted to see in this anything like a warrant to believe that, because all of society is against him, therefore there must have been something to be said for him: not unless the rebellion against tyranny, rape and violence is wrong. Don Giovanni is a bandit, in the etymological meaning of the word - a banished man, a man whose violence and untrustworthiness have made him an alien to human society. No production can show any understanding of the script unless it brings out, with the greatest possible force, the fact that the very presence of Don Giovanni is dangerous, that he should be as uncomfortable and threatening a neighbour as a member of the Mafia or the SS. Unless Don Giovanni Tenorio embodies threat, the whole libretto doesn't make sense.
Throughout, Da Ponte, though writing in the stilted and artificial Italian of the eighteenth century (particularly notable any time Donna Elvira speaks), shows both brilliant plotting ability and remarkable psychological subtlety. It is hard to see what more he and Mozart could have done to drive their message home. That their work is so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented does not speak well for our age.