The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Magnus Tessing Schneider

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367243203
• eBook ISBN: 9781000510577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Original Portrayal of Mozart's Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart's and Da Ponte's opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825).

Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi's portrayal with a study of the opera's early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today's stage productions.

Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.

1 Luigi Bassi as Don Giovanni

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281709-2

The singer and his role

According to an autobiographical sketch that Luigi Bassi (1766–1825) wrote at some point after 1806, and which was reproduced in his obituary, the title role in Don Giovanni had been ‘composed for’ him. ¹ And according to a rumour that circulated in Dresden in his later years, Mozart even ‘had Bassi’s personality in mind’ when he composed it. ² Most probably, it was Bassi’s vocal abilities and stage personality Mozart had in mind, but the claims remind us of the high extent to which eighteenth-century operas were the results of collaborative efforts. Mozart wrote his arias for concrete singers, which inevitably affected the portrayal of the characters. ³ And Da Ponte, too, insisted that ‘the real Aristotles of a dramatic poet are in general, not only the composer of the music, but also the first buffo, the prima donna and not very seldom the 2d 3d and 4th buffoon of the company’. ⁴ Therefore, Luigi Bassi was not simply the first interpreter of the character of Don Giovanni; he was, in more than one sense, its creator and thus inseparable from its original conception.

Mozart probably heard and saw Bassi during his trip to Prague in early 1787, since Bassi is likely to have sung Count Almaviva in the performance of Le nozze di Figaro he attended at the National Theatre on 17 January and in the one he conducted three days later. ⁵ This means that the composer would have been able to draw on his own impressions of the performer when Guardasoni commissioned him to write a new opera for the company during the summer. He may also have had the singers of the Vienna Court Opera in mind when writing the opera, anticipating a later production in the imperial capital; and it is possible that he specifically had the famous buffo Stefano Mandini, the original Count Almaviva, in mind for Don Giovanni, as Julian Rushton has argued. ⁶ However, since Mandini never sang the role, we will never know if Mozart would have adapted it for him.

Mozart does seem to have adapted, if not composed, the role for Luigi Bassi. In his study of the autograph score, Alan Tyson showed that both Don Giovanni’s Act II solos and both his duets with Leporello as well as the second finale were written on paper the composer had acquired in Prague. ⁷ This is striking, since only the overture, Masetto’s aria, the postlude of Zerlina’s Act II aria and a few recitative passages were written on similar paper, which could suggest that large parts of Don Giovanni’s music were composed or adapted for the singer at a late point. Since Mozart probably knew Bassi’s voice, this could mean that the casting of the role was an unsolved matter when he arrived in Prague, less than four weeks before the premiere on 29 October. Ian Woodfield has argued that Gioachino Costa – another baritone in Guardasoni’s company who would sing Don Giovanni in the Leipzig premiere the following summer – might have been a candidate for the role in the Prague premiere as well. ⁸ What supports this theory is the fact that Masetto’s aria was written on Prague paper too, although Mozart must have been familiar with the voice of Giuseppe Lolli, the original Commendatore and Masetto, who had sung in Vienna in 1786. ⁹ Possibly, neither the role of Don Giovanni nor the double role of the Commendatore and Masetto had been cast when the composer arrived. In that case, all three baritones in the company might have been in play for these roles, and hence Mozart may only have had Bassi’s voice and stage personality in mind when he wrote the duets with Leporello, the Act II solos and the second finale.

Such last-minute casting and composing might be the source of an often-told anecdote, which I have only been able to trace back to the French music historian Castil-Blaze. In 1852, he claimed that Bassi had urged Mozart to rewrite Don Giovanni’s and Zerlina’s duettino four times because the singer found it too difficult and therefore musically ineffective. ¹⁰ This is unlikely since the duettino is written on Viennese paper, and Castil-Blaze’s depiction of Bassi as a single-minded star performer hardly fits the historical image of a twenty-one-year-old baritone in a small, provincial company. ¹¹ If authentic at all, the anecdote is more likely to have referred to another part of the opera originally. Bitter’s suggestion that it was the canzonetta Mozart revised on Bassi’s instigation is plausible, but the story could also have referred to one of the three other numbers written on Prague paper. ¹² Or perhaps the orally transmitted story about Mozart’s (re)writing of four numbers necessitated by the late casting developed into the story of a capricious star singer demanding four rewritings of one number.

The only one of Don Giovanni’s solos that was written on Viennese paper was the so-called champagne aria. In the obituary, Hohenthal recounted that Bassi had been ‘so dissatisfied’ with the aria when he first saw it ‘that he asked the composer to write him a bigger aria in the style of those days instead’. Mozart had calmly told him to wait and see how it was received at the premiere, however, and as it happened, ‘the enthusiastic Prague audience, with rapturous applause, immediately demanded that the number was sung da capo’. ¹³ In a later version of the anecdote, Hohenthal presented Bassi’s initial reaction as an example of ‘how little the artists of Guardasoni’s company were able to rise above the conventional’, and the singer, who so badly wanted ‘an aria composed according to all the rules’, had dismissed the champagne aria as a ‘bagatelle’, prompting Mozart to explain ‘the dramatic context’ to him. ¹⁴ To Hohenthal, the idea of a young performer asking the greatest composer of all time to revise the title role in his most famous opera might have seemed close to blasphemy, but in the eighteenth century such negotiations were the order of the day, and Mozart did, after all, revise or write Don Giovanni’s two other solos for his lead singer.

This does not mean that he regarded him as the perfect Don Giovanni. According to another of Hohenthal’s anecdotes, Mozart ‘thought the actor too young for his idea of the character, and Bassi would perhaps discover for himself that he would only be ripe for a satisfactory performance of the role at a later point’. ¹⁵ Hohenthal adds that the older Bassi tended to agree with Mozart. This hardly suggests that the composer had envisioned the character as being older than Bassi’s age at the time, though, as Hohenthal proposes, influenced as he is by Hoffmann’s vision of the seducer. Da Ponte describes Don Giovanni as ‘an extremely licentious young gentleman’ in the list of characters (author’s emphasis), of which Hohenthal was unaware since the description was omitted in the Dresden libretto, which was probably the only Italian edition he knew. ¹⁶ More likely, Mozart’s reservations concerned the artistic immaturity of the actor. Incidentally, Karl Ludwig Costenoble had described the nineteen-year-old Bassi as ‘somewhat wooden’, though he found his singing ‘pleasant’ and he was ‘generally admired’ by the Leipzig audience. ¹⁷ And Mozart himself is known to have been unimpressed with Guardasoni’s singers. He admitted that he was unable to concentrate during their performance of Giovanni Paisiello’s Le gare generose in January 1787. ¹⁸ And when he returned to Prague in October, he noted that the company was ‘not as adept as that in Vienna when it comes to rehearsing such an opera in such a short time’, complaining that the singers refused, ‘out of laziness’, to rehearse on days when they had to perform in the evening. ¹⁹

This criticism adds context to one of Lyser’s anecdotes, included in a fictive memoir of Bassi from 1847. Bassi ‘assured me in later years that he always attempted to sing and play the role exactly as Mozart wanted’, Lyser states, ‘and the “gran maestro” was very pleased with him’. ²⁰ In Lyser’s novella Don Juan from 1837, Bassi tells Mozart as follows: ‘I will do my utmost so that you’ll be pleased with me’. ²¹ And in his 1856 novella Don Giovanni, Bassi says: ‘If you’ll rehearse the part with me yourself, … then I think you’ll be pleased with me’. ²² Lyser had never met Bassi, but he drew on the memoirs of people who did know him, and the fact that he used the same formulation in three contexts, over a twenty-year period, could suggest that he was drawing on an oral tradition that went back to Bassi himself. Bassi promising Mozart – who found the Prague singers generally lazy and unprofessional, as we know – to do his best to ‘please’ him fits Hohenthal’s story about the composer finding him too young: while he was unable to do full justice to the role at the premiere, the youthful performer may have recognised that practice and experience eventually would allow him to perform it adequately. At the end of the book, I shall return to the topic of the late eighteenth-century concept of the performer’s fidelity to the composer’s vision.

Bassi had plenty of time to refine his portrayal. In Prague, Don Giovanni was performed 116 times between 1787 and 1798 (though not exclusively by Guardasoni’s company), and between 1799 and 1806 it was performed thirty-five times in Italian. ²³ Bassi is likely to have sung the title role in the majority, if not in all, of these performances, reviews of the company from 1794, 1800 and 1807 listing it among his most admired portrayals. ²⁴ He most probably sang the role in the Warsaw premiere on 14 October 1789; he sang it in Leipzig in the summer of 1794, and he almost certainly sang it in the summer seasons of 1792 and 1793 as well. ²⁵ He also sang it in some or all of the performances given at the Bohemian country estates of Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz, at Raudnitz (Roudnice nad Labem) in 1804 and 1806, and at Eisenberg (Jezeří) in 1808. ²⁶ All in all, he sang the role almost every season for about twenty years. Naturally, the portrayal developed as the actor matured, though we can assume that it continued to follow the outlines drawn by Da Ponte, Mozart and Guardasoni in October 1787. The last time Bassi sang the role he was around forty, at which point his Don Giovanni was regarded as authoritative by those who had seen him on stage. That the actor and the character had grown together in the awareness of contemporaries is suggested by Weber’s reference to ‘old Don-Giovanni Bassi’ when he first met him in Prague in 1814, seven years after the singer had last appeared on the stage of the local theatre. ²⁷

Intention and experience: prescriptive and descriptive sources

For the reconstruction of something as ephemeral as an actor’s portrayal of a role in the pre-recording era, it is useful to draw on a combination of what I refer to as prescriptive and descriptive sources. ²⁸ While prescriptive sources inform us about what the actor intended or was intended to do on stage, descriptive sources inform us about what he, in fact, did on stage but also of how spectators experienced those stage actions. The individual aesthetic experience inevitably differs from the artistic intention, which is especially true of a theatrical performance; by definition, it is a co-created event where the dramatic text or score, the actor and the spectator meet and interact.

As for Bassi’s Don Giovanni, the most important prescriptive sources are, of course, the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) and the musical score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91). But changes and variations in early versions of these two texts provide insights into the process of creation, which included the active participation of the performer. Giovanna Gronda’s edition of the libretto lists the several differences between 1) the preliminary libretto printed in Vienna in 1787, 2) the text notated in the autograph score, 3) the libretto printed for the premiere in Prague on 29 October and 4) the libretto printed for the Viennese premiere on 7 May 1788. In addition, variations in the 1789 Warsaw libretto give hints as to how Bassi’s portrayal developed in the years immediately after the first performance.

While Mozart’s autograph score contains clues concerning last-minute adjustments and the rehearsal period, as already discussed, conductors’ and prompters’ scores as well as vocal parts associated with productions in which Bassi sang not only contribute to our understanding of how his portrayal developed during the twenty years he sang the role; they may also contain information about changes Mozart himself ordered during rehearsals but neglected to write into the autograph or the conductor’s score. Milada Jonášová’s several articles on Czech Don Giovanni manuscripts contribute importantly to the mapping of this situation.

Playbills may be regarded as a third type of prescriptive source since they show the manager’s view of what the audience was to expect in the theatre; and in the company of Domenico Guardasoni (c. 1731–1806), the manager also happened to be the stage director. A surviving playbill for a 1794 Leipzig performance of Don Giovanni,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Luigi Bassi as Don Giovanni
• 2 The opening scene
• 3 Don Giovanni and the three women
• 4 The party episode
• 5 The disguise episode
• 6 The graveyard scene
• 7 The second finale
• Postscript: In defence of the operatic work
• Bibliography
• Index