ABSTRACT
The postscript, ‘In defence of the operatic work’, examines Don Giovanni’s reception from a philosophical perspective. In the eighteenth century, people regarded it as a connoisseurs’ opera, its music possessing a ‘unique character’ that transcended individual productions. First, this put special demands on the singers, giving rise to the idea of the performer’s ‘fidelity’ to the ‘spirit’ of the composer or the work. Second, it meant that audiences kept returning, giving rise to the idea of ‘classical’ music. And third, these circumstances prompted E. T. A. Hoffmann to found the ‘interpretation’ of operatic works as a genre of writing. Behind these innovations stands the late Enlightenment concept of art’s autonomy, which posits that aesthetic experiences teach us to make judgements, and hence that aesthetics is the basis of ethics. Since the late twentieth century, however, the concepts of fidelity, classical music and interpretation have lost ground within opera studies, along with the concept of art’s autonomy. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, the postscript links this tendency to the ethical turn in politics and the arts, which subjects evidence-based argumentation and aesthetic cognition to an opinion-based moral consensus, which has led to the instrumentalisation of Mozart’s opera for didactic and political purposes.
