But first we have the masterpiece and model of all tenor solos. In it Ottavio commends his Il mio tesoro to the care of these friends, and in it he proves himself the truest, tenderest, most devoted and most religious of lovers, if Heaven has reserved it to a stronger force than his to crush the mighty sinner against whom he has taken such an oath of vengeance. But the opera could not rob itself of the statue, and its last scene, and its whole sublimity, to make him a hero, when it was enough that he should know how to love a Donna Anna.
Passing over a duett between Leporello and Zerlina, rarely sung, in fact an after-thought of the composer, which he is said to have added to conciliate the lower taste of a Viennese manager or audience; and passing over (for we must be brief) a truly transcendent solo for Elvira: Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata, in whose fluid, ever-modulating melody her musing, sad soul seems dissolved in reverie, we come to the marvelous church-yard scene. Here glimmers the white equestrian statue of the murdered commander in the back-ground; and here the Don and Leporello seek a rendezvous after their new discomfiture, to re-exchange hats and mantles, and so forth. Their loud levity is suddenly hushed by a voice of warning from the statue, accompanied in strange chords by the unearthly tones of the trombones (which instruments, instead of being lavished in Verdi fashion, upon all the strong passages, have been entirely kept back till now for this supernatural “beginning of the end,”) mingled with the low reed tones. Di rider finirai, etc. (“Thou shalt cease to laugh before dawn!”) A short old choral strain, in which the voice ends, spectral-like, upon the Dominant of the key (A minor), struck with the major Third. This is a church cadence; it belongs to eternity, which knows no Minor, no such type of “earthly un-rest.” It freezes to the heart of Don Giovanni, who starts dismayed, but only for a moment; and soon the marble lips break silence once more to rebuke his mockery. So far it has been introductory recitative; but now the orchestra is all life and melody again, for the luscious music of the duett in which Giovanni compels the trembling servant at the sword’s point to salute the statue and invite him to sup with him. There is no more exquisite fairy-work in the whole opera than the instrumentation of this scene. It were hard to tell whether the impression left by it partakes most of the comic, of the supernaturally terrible, or of the beautiful. All these elements are grotesquely blended in it, yet without seeming incongruity. The beauty of the music harmonizes and idealizes the action; it lends its singular fascination to the marvelous; it makes the terror doubly real, by expressing the vague charm which every terror has after all to the soul, glad (even in its terror) of the excitement of something altogether strange and infinite. Mozart knew better than to freeze the blood up here entirely, with unearthly tones of horror, except during those brief utterances of the marble rider; that he reserved for the end, of which this is but the beginning. He has lavished all the luxury of melodic invention upon the instrumentation of this duett; the music in the main still gushes warm and genial and human, and hence you feel the supernatural all the more inwardly and powerfully, when shudders of strange awe cross occasionally its placid, sparkling flow. O statua gentillissima—cheerily and bravely the beautiful strain sets out, in the rich key of E major; but as the knave shrinks back in terror, crying padron! mirate! etc., the deprecating expression of his voice dropping through the interval of a Seventh, with the instruments accompanying in unison, is alike droll and marvelous. Still the cheerful melody goes on, in spite of ghosts, until the statue nods acceptance, when the unearthly modulation and tremolo of the music, falling with sudden emphasis upon Leporello’s Ah! — —h! che scena! (Ah! what a sight!), gives the whole scene for the time the superstitious coloring of his soul. But when he comes to tell his master how the spectre nodded, and when his master repeats the strain and gesture with him, the fear has become subordinate to the charm of adventure, and the music takes the gay and reckless tone of Giovanni. Life shall be all a feast, is his creed, ghosts and miracles to the contrary; and festally the bright strain dies away, softer and softer, as they depart, to the tune of Andiamo via di qua (let us quit this place), to which the servant’s voice chimes in as second very heartily.
Here the curtain usually falls, closing a second Act, although the composer covers the homeward flight of the pair, fatigued and hungry with that night’s adventures and discomfitures, and the preparation of the supper, by a beautiful and elaborate recitative and aria of Donna Anna, addressed to her devoted Ottavio, whose urgent plea for the consummation of their union she tenderly puts off, as with a presentiment that her love is to know no earthly consummation, and that her life is already too much of the other world. This song: Non mi dir, bloomed one of the heavenliest and purest in the wreath of Jenny Lind.
Act Third is the grand Finale, with its tremendous music, its apparition, its supernatural vindication of the Law, and the splendid sinner’s doom. Remember, day has not dawned yet since that other Finale, to the First Act; their supper that time was stormily broken off, and they have had little rest in the mean time. But they have got home at last, and Gia la mensa è preparata: now the supper is prepared; a smart and animated strain of full orchestra in the bold key of D. The Don has shut himself in by himself with all the harmonies of sense and appetite; it is the pure feast of egoism; there are no guests, but his own appetites and riotous imaginations, for whom all things are provided; and little thinks he of the guest whom he has invited! Droll Leporello, now all appetite, is in attendance, devouring furtive morsels of the rich dishes, and uncorking the champagne, (a situation commonly too tempting to our buffo, who makes the fun excessively and disgustingly broad,) and making broad allusions to the barbaro appetito of his master. There is a band of wind instruments, too, from whom all the while proceed the most enlivening appeals to composite enjoyment, in a succession of rare morsels of melody from well-known operas of the time, for which both master and man show an appreciating ear. The last of these is the famous Non piu andrai, from Mozart’s own “Nozze di Figaro,” to which Leporello may well exclaim: “That I know too well.” Through all this the Titian-like, voluptuous quality of Mozart comes out afresh. It is the music of pure, unalloyed sensuous enjoyment; not a shadow of aught serious or sentimental comes over its harmony, until once more his better nature makes one final appeal, entreating him to repentance, in the person of poor, constant Donna Elvira, who suddenly rushes in and kneels at his feet. But the Don laughs at her simple lecture, and preaches up to her his bacchanalian gospel.
Here mark a fine point in the action, a fine touch of poetic truth, worthy of Mozart’s genius. It is she, his better nature, as we have said, his own rejected truer self, who loves him better than he loves himself; it is she, Elvira, who, as she leaves the stage, is the first to meet the fearful apparition and by her shriek give warning. That shriek, thrown into the music, has suddenly changed its smooth, sparkling surface into fierce boiling eddies, and stirred up the whole sea of harmony from its profoundest depths. The musicians on the stage have vanished. No time now for their toy melodies! Every chord now cleaves the dark veil of the supernatural, like lightnings in the blackest night; the syncopated rhythm tells of vague and wonderful forebodings. Che grido è questo? (What noise is this?) And Leporello is sent out to see. Wilder and heavier grows the music, as he returns white and speechless, and only able in his half-wittedness of terror to imitate with his feet the heavy ta, ta, the approaching foot-fall of the man of marble, who has descended from his charger in the grave-yard. It requires the master’s hardihood to open the door for him, and amid those solemn and terrific crashes of the orchestra, with which the overture commenced, the strange guest stalks into the middle of the scene.
With hard, ponderous, marble tones, like blows, falling whole octaves, the statue announces himself as good as his word in accepting Giovanni’s invitation. The amazed unbeliever, trembling and yet summoning up his whole pride of will, which never yet forsook him, would fain prove as good as his word, too, and orders Leporello, who has crawled away under the table, to get ready another supper. But “not on mortal food feeds” this guest from the other world; “graver concerns” have led him here; and the instruments are again traversing those unsettled scales, whose wonderful effect we noticed in the overture. Parla, parla: rings out the rich, fresh baritone of the dauntless Amphytrion, as much as to say: “talk on, old fellow! I listen; you are a ghost, but I am a substance; I believe in myself, say what you will.” All very brave! but listen to the orchestra (as you cannot help listening) if you would know how nevertheless it goes with him in the inner workings of his soul, in those mysterious depths of consciousness which hitherto he has so wilfully refrained from sounding. That heavy, muffled tread of the sub-bass in triplets, making the ground quake, means more than the “tertian ague” of poor Leporello there, with head thrust out cautiously from under the table, and voice, automaton-like, moving in unison with the basso profondo of the orchestra. A pause is filled with a monotonous beat of the basses, when the crashing diminished-seventh chords begin anew, and louder than before, while the spectre again opens its marble jaws to tender the Don an invitation in its turn, which he, stout-hearted to the last, in spite of Leporello’s trembling, grotesque warnings, accepts. The statue asks his hand in pledge; he boldly gives it, starts as if an infinite pang and sense of death shot from the cold, stony hand through all the marrow of his bones; with an infinite audacity of will he refuses to repent; the spectre sinks through the ground; he is a doomed one; the flames of hell burst in on every side, with visions of the damned; a chorus of spectres: vieni! (come!) is heard amid the infernal whirl and tempest of the music; he wrestles with the demons and drops dead, the whole phantasmagoria vanishing, just as the other characters of the piece come in search of the reprobate, who listen to Leporello’a chattering story, dispose of their several destinies after the approved fashion of dramatic conclusions, and wind up with chanting a solemn canon over the Dissoluto punito, to the words: “Such is the end of the evil-doer!”
It is usual, however, to terminate the performance with the fall of Giovanni. The parts which follow, although admirable as music, are plainly superfluous to the action, as a poetic and artistic whole, and must have been added by Mozart out of mere conformity to old dramatic usage, which assembles and disposes of all the surviving characters of a piece in the last scene.
There is great room for melodramatic nonsense and diablerie in this judgement scene, in which the theatres have used full license. But if the orchestra be complete and efficient, there is no possibility of travestying or perverting the sublime and terrible intention of the music, which from the moment that the statue enters is enough to freeze one’s blood, and preoccupies all avenues of sense or consciousness with supernatural and infinite suggestions. And yet does Music’s sweet and faithful prophecy of reconciliation, like the “still, small voice” out of the inmost heart of things, still reach us somehow through it all!
The reader, who has followed us through this review of “Don Giovanni,” clinging always to the musical thread of interpretation, will find himself as little able as ourselves to sympathize with the regret, so frequently expressed, that Mozart should have prostituted his genius in this composition, by the false marriage of so much divine music with an unworthy subject. We believe the marriage was a true one. He did not merely cater to a low, licentious taste, in the selection of this story. Never was a choice made more heartily. Or, if he did not himself choose the plot, yet he fell in most heartily, and as it were, by a providential correspondence with the invention of Da Ponte—as heartily as he afterward fell in with the terrific images of the old Latin hymn, when he composed his own “Requiem,” in writing a Requiem to order for another. In these two works the life and genius of Mozart found their highest expression. “Don Juan” and the “Requiem,” in all their contrast, are alike true to the very texture and temper of the man. “Don Juan,” written in the hey-day of his genial faculties, in his hour and scene of greatest outward success, in the city of Prague, where he was understood and loved as nowhere else, surrounded by devoted friends, and with an orchestra and troup of singers worthy to be his interpreters, represents his sunny side, his keen sensibility to all refined delights of sense and soul, and his great faith in joy, in ecstasy, in all material and sensual harmonies. The “Requiem” bears to “Don Juan,” as a whole, the same relation that the last scene of that opera bears to the preceding parts; it expresses the religious awe and mystery of his soul, his singular presentiment of death, his constant feeling of the Infinite. The opera, in its last scene, rises to a sphere of music kindred with the “Requiem;” there vibrated the same deep chords of his nature. It was the very subject of all others for him to pour the whole warm life-tide of his soul and music into, and thus lift up and animate a poor old literal fiction, that somehow strangely kept its hold upon the popular mind, with all its weight of grotesqueness, extravagance, vulgarity and tom-foolery, into a vivid drama of the whole impetuous, bewildered, punished, yet far-hoping and indomitable experiment of human life.