Introduction

In today’s stage productions and critical commentaries, the title character of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni (1787) is mostly depicted as cruel and violent. The Introduction traces that image back to German singing translations from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which have had a lasting impact on traditional stage practice, casting, tempi and vocal interpretation. Da Ponte’s libretto, however, is a critical rewriting of the story of Don Juan and the stone guest, a tradition within the popular theatre rooted in the seventeenth century. Rejecting its anti-libertine morality, the libretto depicts the seducer’s punishment as out of proportion with his transgressions. The early German translators and adapters, who regarded this structural imbalance as a dramaturgical flaw, aggravated Don Giovanni’s crimes in order to make them fit his supernatural punishment instead. The most influential of these translators was Friedrich Rochlitz (1801) who Christianised the opera, inspiring E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous novella (1813), in which Don Giovanni is depicted as a Romantic hero who defies the divine order through his emotional destructiveness. Though Rochlitz’s Don Giovanni is far more cruel and violent than Da Ponte’s, scholars have traditionally described his translation as a sentimental ennobling of the seducer.