Listen to This. Alex Ross

in. This insistent deepening of an ostensibly comic situation would become Mozart’s signature in the next several years; The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosìfan tutte, the three operas that he created in tandem with his ideal librettist, the Italian Jewish polymath Lorenzo Da Ponte, sprawl across the boundary between the comic and the tragic, defining life as what happens in between.

      After 1786, the storm of style abates slightly. In this period, Mozart was no longer attracting sufficient numbers of subscribers to his public concerts, in part because of the economic effects of an expensive war with Turkey. So the production of piano concertos tapers off, and there are no symphonies after the “Jupiter,” of 1788. Instead, the completist listener must get through thickets of minuets, contredanses, and other popular dances, the result of Mozart’s new, revenue-enhancing job as the emperor’s Kammermusicus. These pieces are a little exasperating in large quantity, but they are full of witty, even zany details, and serve as a reminder that eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both “popular” and “serious” styles. Period dances are deployed to dramatic effect in the ballroom scene in Don Giovanni, in which an aristocratic minuet, a popular contredanse, and a working-class Deutscher unfold simultaneously, in three different meters. The episode demonstrates Mozart’s ability to move as a free agent through the social and cultural hierarchies of his time.

      In his last years, Mozart is less prolific than before. He seems to be groping his way toward a new style, more concise in form and more melodically compressed. Charles Rosen, in his book The Classical Style, isolates a telltale episode in the Adagio of the String Quintet in D (1790)—a quietly radical sequence in which, as Rosen writes, “four completely different kinds of rhythm [are] superimposed in a contrapuntal texture at once complex and deeply touching.” One violin moves up by steps, the other moves haltingly down, the two violas sigh on repeated seconds and thirds, and the cello undermines the harmony with a jazzy pizzicato figure that plunges down an octave and a half. Right afterward comes a radiant little theme of rising-and-falling phrases, which brings back one of the oldest recurring motifs in Mozart’s language—an archetype of love or longing. There is something elegiac in this gesture toward the past; Mozart, near the end, goes back to his beginnings. Yet it is hazardous to connect the elusive emotions of the late works with the fact of the composer’s approaching death. Julian Rushton wryly notes that critics used to detect “feelings of impending doom” in the Clarinet Concerto and the Piano Concerto No. 27, both of which appeared in Mozart’s final year; it turns out that the first movement of each was sketched several years earlier.

      What Mozart might have done next is no one’s guess. The pieces that emerged from the suddenly productive year 1791—The Magic Flute, the ultimate Leopoldian synthesis of high and low; La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus), a robust revival of the aging art of opera seria; the silken lyricism of the Clarinet Concerto; the Requiem, at once cerebral and raw—form a garden of forking paths. Mozart was still a young man, discovering what he could do. In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity—The Tempest, Hamlet, the two-part Faust—but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, Don Giovanni.”

      With the Mozart myths perpetually rising out of the ground where scholars have tried to bury them, the usefulness of Don Giovanni is that it puts a stake through the heart of the chocolate-box Mozart, the car-radio Mozart, the Mozart-makes-you-smarter Mozart. If the opera were played in bus stations or dentists’ waiting rooms, it would spread fear. It might cause perversion in infants. No matter how many times you hear the punitive D-minor chord with which the opera begins, or the glowering diminished seventh that heralds the arrival of the stone statue of the Commendatore (“Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner, and I have come”), it generates a certain mental panic. Mozart’s harmonies of disaster are all the more terrifying because they break through the frame of what purports to be a saucy comedy about an aristocratic rake—a successor to Figaro. The fact that Figaro is actually quoted in the score—“Non più andrai” is one of the airs that the Don enjoys at dinner, just before the Commendatore arrives—suggests that Mozart is consciously subverting his reputation as a supplier of ambient musical pleasure.

      The scholars Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz have put together an anthology titled The Don Giovanni Moment, which leaves aside the discussion of who Mozart really was and addresses the music’s impact on Western culture. That influence is enormous; if you wanted to locate the moment at which the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic age, you might well settle on Don Giovanni. As various writers in The Don Giovanni Moment recount, Goethe set to work in earnest on his Faust after seeing a performance of Don Giovanni, in 1797; Kierkegaard was excited by the “sensuous genius” of Mozart’s music, and by the Don’s chase after erotic release; the ambivalent liberal Pushkin was torn between the Don’s swagger and the Commendatore’s rectitude; George Bernard Shaw riffed on the opera in Man and Superman, letting the Don end up in heaven. Wagner was deeply in Mozart’s debt; when the tragic god Wotan sings the words “Das Ende!” in the Ring, he traverses the same intervals with which the Commendatore intones Don Giovanni’s name.

      The leading Romantic rhapsodist of Don Giovanni was the novelist, storyteller, critic, and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose 1813 story-essay “Don Juan” is analyzed by Richard Eldridge in the anthology. For Hoffmann, the character of the Don is uninteresting on paper—“a bon vivant who loves wine and girls immoderately, who arrogantly invites the stone man, who portrays the old father whom he cut down in self-defense, to join him at his festive table.” Mozart’s music transforms the Don into a radical sensualist, a seeker of extremes. But he is a Romantic gone to seed: infinite longing devolves into sexual predation, a contempt for the ordinary curdles into cynicism. On the other side stands Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, whom the Don attempts to rape in the first scene of the opera. Hoffmann’s narrator speculates that Donna Anna actually succumbed to the Don’s advances, and swears vengeance to cover up her shame. Hoffmann is right in hearing something weirdly violent in Donna Anna’s utterances, especially the aria “Or sai chi l’onore” and the ragged recitative that introduces it. There is a blackness at the heart of her righteousness, just as there is a life force in the Don’s malice. Mozart’s quest for middle ground takes him into the risky space between good and evil. Both the terms and the outcome of this “conflict between godly and demonic powers,” as Hoffmann called it, are murky.

      When the Don finally goes down to hell, you are not sure whether you are hearing infernal legions celebrating his arrival or the armies of heaven rather too enthusiastically enjoying their capacity for destruction—or, perhaps, some unholy concert of the two. The scene is structured around a staggered sequence of upward-creeping lines, sometimes in the bass and sometimes in the treble. Twice, the strings embroider that pattern with vehement up-and-down scales, and the fact that each scale is a half-step higher than the previous one gives the impression that the music is obliterating everything in its path, like a death machine in a medieval etching. Toward the end, a thumping four-note figure comes to the fore; it recalls the Commendatore knocking at the door but ends up sounding like the stomping of feet.

      At the same time, as Michel Noiray observes in The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, the scene has an archaic, religious aspect, echoing Renaissance and Baroque sacred music. In the first bars of the opera, immediately after the colossal opening chords, Mozart revives the device of the chromatic lamento bass. There might be a certain irony in the gesture; Peter Williams calls it “fate being underlined with a familiar and mundane formula, like doggerel verse in Faust.” When the Commendatore exacts his revenge, the formula is reversed: instead of trudging down, as in the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, the bass line plows relentlessly upward. As it happens, the same effect appears in several of Mozart’s youthful masses, in settings of the word “Crucifixus.” In addition, Mozart probably took inspiration from the hectic, dissonant dance that concludes Gluck’s 1761 ballet Don Juan—a diabolical chaconne in the key of D minor. For perhaps the first time in musical history, references to the past become a modernist gesture, a radical haunting.

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