ABSTRACT
The catalogues of amatory acquisition which Byron incorporates in his letters on Venetian life remind people that he is thinking, around this period, in terms of epic or mock-epic poetry. There is also an acknowledgement in Don Juan that the "rattling on" of its cantos beyond the epic scheme of twelve books originally projected increasingly resembles an inventory, or sales catalogue, of phenomena. The effect is not so much to avoid repetition by means of lexical variety as to reveal rhetorical copia as itself a variety of repetition, bound by the persistence of "thought" to an increasingly descriptive iteration of the same. The European reception of Mozart's works and Don Giovanni in particular, in the first half of the nineteenth century seems markedly bound up in this dialectic of text and idea. This chapter demonstrates that this is far from being the case, and that the productive, repetitive life force of Don Juan is inseparable from its life.
