‘Every Carnival Has Its End’ | Nathan Shields
“With blondes, he praises their gentleness; with brunettes, their faithfulness…. The large ones he calls majestic, the little ones charming.” So Don Giovanni’s manservant, Leporello, tells the jilted Donna Elvira. Then the knife twist: “But his greatest passion is the young virgin.” The exchange neatly captures the ambivalence and amorality of Mozart’s seducer. Don Giovanni, it suggests, has a way of being all things to all people. Throughout the opera, he is repeatedly confused with someone else. When he and Leporello switch outfits, not even their lovers see through the disguise; when he tries to rape the noblewoman Donna Anna, she mistakes him for her fiancé. The audience is hardly clearer about his identity. Alone among the opera’s major characters, he has neither soliloquies nor moments of introspection. His flights of lyricism, like the seduction duet “Là ci darem la mano,” are means to sexual conquest. His great showpiece, the Champagne Aria, “Fin ch’han del vino,” betrays no signs of an inner life—only a relentless, superhuman energy. Leporello tells Elvira that Giovanni has seduced 1,003 women …
