ABSTRACT
The single most important and enduring belief among eighteenth-century ideas about femininity was the identification of women with nature. Enlightenment thinkers, following Socrates' example, prided themselves on their ability to transcend the fear of death by understanding nature in a secular, scientific and distanced manner. The cyclic instability of female physiology had led seventeenth-century medicine to speak of hot, volatile 'animal humours' rising from the womb to the brain, thereby determining feminine sensibilities from within. Leporello whispers a semiquaver arch to Giovanni, whose response modulates to the dominant and varies Elvira's opening. He is already taking structural control. She recognizes him with motivic scraps, which are answered as before by the violins' demisemiquaver descending scales. Giovanni cadences decisively in the dominant, and Elvira begins the equivalent of a sonata exposition codetta, using Leporello's semiquaver arch.
