ABSTRACT
Chapter 6, ‘The graveyard scene’, examines the scene where Don Giovanni invites the statue of the Commendatore to supper. In the traditional Stone Guest plays, this scene had been criticised for its dramatic implausibility, but Lorenzo Da Ponte’s critical rewriting undermines the moral authority of the Commendatore, while Mozart creates a powerful tension between the unreality and the uncanniness of the scene. The speaking statue is depicted as an absurd theatrical device inherited from Baroque theatre: an emblem of social condemnation rooted in religious hypocrisy. In the Prague production, and in productions related to it, the Commendatore and Masetto were sung by the same singer, which allowed for the possibility of Don Giovanni taking the voice of the statue, which threatens to have him killed, for that of Masetto, his would-be killer. Don Giovanni, who believes neither in ghosts nor in speaking statues, originally issued the supper invitation as a joke on the superstitious Leporello. Already during Mozart’s lifetime, however, German translators restored the old religious symbolism in order to justify his supernatural punishment, which was not sufficiently justified in the Italian libretto. This tendency continues even in recent commentaries on the opera.
