Don Giovanni

Whether you’re making a film or TV or writing an opera, it’s the same problem: is the script worth the effort, before you get started? Alas, with many operas the answer is “No” with the result that they’re likely to be appreciated – if that’s the right word – more for their sonic qualities than for any dramatic content. Rather like the screenwriter in Hollywood, the librettist who writes the words of a successful opera is unlikely to get invited to swish parties on the strength of his (or her – Myfanwy Piper did some great collaboration with Benjamin Britten) literary efforts.

Mozart was doubly lucky. Firstly he was blessed with the ability to work out whole pieces in his head and then just write them down (Just read that sentence again. The man was extraordinary, even by musicians’ standards. About forty symphonies, dozens of concertos, operas, masses, sonatas – over 600 in total. And when he was my age, he’d been dead for quite some time). Secondly he got to write some real quality musical dramas – to borrow Wagner’s phrase – because he got to work with the literate and intelligent wordsmith Lorenzo da Ponte. My favourite of the three operas they produced is Don Giovanni, the tale of a serial ladykiller with a trail of broken hearts behind him.

From the opening thunderous chords – borrowed for the titles of the film Amadeus – through to the Don’s inevitably sticky end, after being rash enough to invite a dead man to supper (it works a lot better than that makes it sound!), it’s a melodious, by turns tragic, comic, chilling (especially at one point in a graveyard) and par excellence a dramatic piece which holds up to repeated listening. Mozart even gleefully sends himself up at one point by quoting one of his own tunes from their earlier theatrical success The Marriage of Figaro and having the character Leporello comment (in my (very) free translation) “Oh no, not that tune again!”

Try it in small bite-size chunks and get to know it. It’s well worth the attention. It first played in 1787 in a small theatre in Prague, which I took the trouble to find when I briefly lived there. It’ll continue to be played for a very long time. Because, like all of Mozart’s work that I know, it has quality.