ABSTRACT
The idea of supernatural retribution was pre-Enlightenment, and pre-Renaissance to boot. However, the way that Da Ponte’s libretto presents the old myth of Don Juan, and the way that Mozart’s music sounds it, is intelligible within the terms of the Enlightenment’s thinking about ethics, aesthetics and music. I turn first to Kant’s morality as found in his The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1783), then to Sade’s negative ethics, before returning to Don Giovanni. This discussion also serves as a philosophical basis for interpreting Così fan tutte, the finale of which is the subject of the next chapter. First, I recapitulate those elements of my discussion of the European Enlightenment that concern morality.
