ABSTRACT
Ottavio is Giovanni's 'Other Man'. His idealized love for Anna is precisely the reverse of Giovanni's negative libertine materialism. Giovanni's active desires for any woman now are directly opposed to Ottavio's passive resignation to wait years for Anna. The ever-yearning young man of the Sturm und Drang, drenched in sorrows for his beloved, was by this time highly fashionable with German readers in Vienna and throughout the German principalities. This is why so much of the literature on Giovanni says that Ottavio is weak, but looked at another way he is superior as the moral other to Giovanni, whose sexuality rests on violence. The implicit dangers of Alfonso's psychodrama for the officers arise about half-way through the second act. Guglielmo has seduced Dorabella, but Fiordiligi remains intransigent in the face of Ferrando's amorous overtures, if only in the libretto. Consequently he feels a combination of betrayal by Dorabella and jealousy of Guglielmo, to whom he now feels sexually inferior.
