Europe: A History (136 page)

No synopsis, however, could do justice to the exquisite partnership of the score and the libretto, whose memorable moments have withstood any amount of repetition and parody. In Aria No. 4 (‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’) Giovanni’s servant boasts to Elvira of his master’s prowess in gallantry:

In Italy six hundred and forty,
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one
A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one,
While in Spain already a thousand and three!
Milk e tre!)
³⁹

In the delicious No. 7 (‘Là ci darem la mano’)—’the most perfect duet of seduction imaginable’—Giovanni wins the unsuspecting Zerlina without a trace of violence or deceit. His strong confident melody is picked up, played with by the soprano until both walk off arm in arm in a rapture of sheer delight:

Duettino Zerlina, D. Giovanni

Ser. 1 FL 2 Ob. 2 Bin. 2 Hn. Andante

In the melodramatic graveyard scene (Act II, Scene n) the players tremble as the Stone Guest declaims his eerie prophecy to the shattering accompaniment of trombones: ‘By dawn you will have laughed for the last time’:

Sestetto D. Anna, D. Elvira, Zeriina, D. Ottavio, Leporello, Masetto
Str. 2 FL
2
Ob. 2 CL 2 Bsn. 2 Hn. 2 Tr. Timp.

After the finale, when Giovanni’s doom is complete, the cast is left singing the none-too-convincing moral in chorus to a scintillating double fugue:

Questo è il fin di chi fa mal
E de’ perfidi la morte alia vita è sempre ugual

(This is the end of the sinner’s game I His life and death are just the same.)
⁴²

For the opera’s second performance, in Vienna seven months later, Mozart and Da Ponte made a number of changes to suit a new cast and a new theatre. To accommodate some additions, they dropped Ottavio’s Aria, No. 21(22) (‘II mio tesoro intanto’):

Aña D. Ottavio
Str. 2 CL 2 Bsn. 2 Hn.

But the number was soon reinstated, and has remained an essential part of the standard repertoire ever since.

Mozart made two visits to Prague in 1787, both with his wife, Constanze. He was at the very peak of his career. During the first visit, in January and February, he presented his Symphony no. 38, ‘The Prague’ (K. 504), and later conducted a triumphant performance of
Le nozze di Figaro
. The reception was so favourable that he immediately signed a contract with Bondini for a new opera to be staged at the start of the next season. On his return to Vienna he gave some lessons to a
seventeen-year-old pianist from Bonn called Beethoven. In May he was grievously stricken by the death of his beloved father and troubled by the settlement of the estate. Yet not a trace of his distress can be heard either in the
Divertimento
in F (K. 522) or in the delectable
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
in G (K. 525) both of which were composed that summer.

Mozart’s six-week trip to Prague with
Don Giovanni
can be traced both from his correspondence and from the local press. He left Vienna on 1 October, having just received the meagre proceeds of the auction of his father’s chattels at Salzburg. He travelled again with Constanze, who was six months pregnant. The journey of c.150 miles took three days, since the
Praeger Oberpostamtszeitung
was already announcing his arrival on the 4th. ‘The news has spread here that the opera newly written by [our celebrated Herr Mozart],
Das steinerne Gastmahl
be given for the first time at the National Theatre.’
⁴⁴
He took rooms in the Three Lions Inn at Kohlmarkt 20, and was joined four days later by his librettist Da Ponte, who stayed across the street at the Glatteis Hotel. The 13th, 14th, and 15th were taken up by the visit of the Princess of Tuscany, and by the last-minute decision to stage a German version of
Le nozze de Figaro
for her benefit. Mozart at this point was despondent. ‘Everything dawdles along here,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘because the singers, who are lazy, refuse to rehearse on opera days, and the manager, who is anxious and timid, will not force them.’
⁴⁵
The last week of the month was taken up by the sickness of various singers, and by the lack of an overture. But finally the première took place amidst universal applause. The
Oberpostamtszeitung
was ecstatic:

On Monday … the Italian Opera company gave the ardently awaited opera by Maestro Mozard [sic],
Don Giovanni
… Connoisseurs and musicians say that Prague has never yet heard the like… Everybody on the stage and in the orchestra strained every nerve to thank Mozard by rewarding him with a good performance. There were also heavy additional costs, caused by several choruses and changes of scenery, all of which Herr Guardosoni had brilliantly attended to. The unusually large attendance testifies to unanimous approbation.
⁴⁶

The opera was repeated on 3 November for Mozart’s personal benefit. The Mozarts left Prague on the 13th, but not before several prominent Praguers had written lavish compliments in the composer’s scrapbook:

When Orpheus’ magic lute out-rings
Amphion to his lyre sings,
The lions tame, the rivers quiet grow,
The tigers listen, rocks a-walking go.
When Mozart masterly music plays
And gathers undivided praise,
The quire of Muses stays to hear,
Apollo is himself all ear.

Your admirer and friend,
Joseph Hurdalek

Prague, 12 November 1787, Rector of the General Seminary
⁴⁷

Map 19.
Mozart’s Journey to Prague, 1787

During their second trip to Prague the Mozarts stayed much of the time with their friends the Dušeks, in their Villa Bertramka at Smichov, where the final numbers of
Don Giovanni
were completed. Franz Dušek was a concert pianist; his wife, Jozefa, a soprano and long-standing friend with whom Mozart felt greatly at ease. Before leaving, Mozart was recommended for the sinecure of imperial
Kammermusikus
.

He arrived back in Vienna to find that the annual salary offered was only 800 gulden, the previous incumbent, Gluck, having died with a salary of 2,000. As always, his prestige outstripped his finances. On 27 December Constanze gave birth to their fourth child, a daughter who lived for six months. Mozart was coming to the end of a golden decade.

Mozart’s collaboration with the Abbé Da Ponte marks a milestone in Europe’s musical development. Their three productions—
Le nozze di Figaro
(1786),
Don Giovanni
(1787), and
Cost fan tutte
(1790)—belong to
opera buffa
, one of the lightest and, supposedly, most ephemeral of genres; yet they have survived triumphantly. Together with Mozart’s German operas
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
(1782) and
Die Zauberflöte
(1791), they form the earliest group of compositions to establish themselves within the standard repertoire of Grand Opera. Indeed, within that repertoire of some thirty items they are matched in quantity and unending popularity only by the operas of Wagner and Verdi. Da Ponte proved an ideal partner. A fugitive from his native Venice, where he had been born in the ghetto, he did not take his conversion and his holy orders too seriously. He wrote the text of
Don Giovanni
from the heart.
⁴⁸
(See Appendix III, p. 1278.)

In the absence of sound-recording
[SOUND]
,
there have been several literary attempts to recapture the extraordinary ambience of Mozart’s music-making. Sixty years after Mozart’s death, for example, the poet Eduard Mörike (1804–75) did so by means of a short novella,
Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag
(1851). He recounts an imaginary encounter which the composer might well have had with the sort of cultivated people who made up his most enthusiastic audiences. Wolfgang and Constanze are travelling towards Prague through the pine-clad hills of the Bohemian forest when they spy the castle of the Counts von Schinzberg. Wolfgang is caught red-handed when he carelessly plucks a fruit from an orange tree in the castle’s park. But he is rewarded with an invitation to dinner. After dinner he sits down to play at the piano and recounts, with musical illustrations, how he composed the finale of
Don Giovanni
.

Without more ado, he put out the candles in the two candelabra standing beside him, and that terrifying air—Di rider finirai pria dell’aurora—rang through the deathly stillness of the room… From distant starry spheres, the silver trumpet notes seem to fall through the blue night, to pierce the soul with the icy tremor of doom.

Chi va là. Who goes there?

Give an answer—One hears Don Giovanni demand.

Then the voice rings out afresh, monotonous as before, bidding the impious youth to leave the dead in peace…
⁴⁹

Nor have the Czechs forgotten the brief days when Mozart graced their country. A contemporary Czech poet uses an evening at the Villa Bertramka as a springboard for reflections on unattainable paradise:

A když počal hrát
a copánek mu poskakoval po zádech
přestaly šumët i lastury
a nasta vily svá rozkošná ouška…

(And when he began to play I and his pigtail to dance on his back I even the sea-shells ceased humming I and pricked up their delicate ears. I Why did they not lock the door then? I Why not unharness the horses from the coach? I He departed so soon.)
⁵⁰

The Prague which Mozart loved was reaching a peak of splendour that few European cities could rival. It was the second city of the Habsburg domains, and had recently undergone five or six decades of unparalleled architectural reconstruction. The elegant neo-classical Tyl Theatre, only four years old, where
Don Giovanni
was performed, was just one of many magnificent new public buildings. The Thun Palace (1727), now the British Embassy, where the Mozarts stayed during their first visit in 1787, was just one of a score of sumptuous aristocratic residences of recent date, including those of Colleredo-Mansfeld, Goltz-Kinsky, Clam-Gallas, Caretto-Millesimo, and Lobkowitz-Schwarzenberg. The basilica of St Nicholas (1755), where Mozart’s
Mass in C
was performed in the week after his departure, was one of a dozen Baroque churches designed by the Diezenhofers, father and son. The Carolinum (completed 1718) housed the university complex, the Clementinum (completed 1715) the Jesuit church and library.