ABSTRACT
The presents relatively brief accounts of the three finales of Figaro and the first finales of Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in order to prepare the ground. It explains how Mozart handled finales' composite large-scale musico-dramatic structures in terms of related antinomies between structure and process on the one hand, and unity and diversity on the other. The chapter concerns mainly with those motivic and tonal relationships that his thoughts can hold an immediate temporal resonance for listeners, rather than with spatial conceptions of the finales as musical wholes. However, sometimes long-term motivic relations are easily perceptible, particularly in the latter two operas, when they are so, they are of particular significance. The Mozart finale is made up of separate numbers, but many of them run directly one into another, and they are intended to be heard as a unity. Those large groupings represent the closest that Mozart came to the conception of large-scale continuity.
