Overture to Don Giovanni

Collaborations between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte produced three of the finest classical operas in existence, including the powerful blend of drama and comedy that is Don Giovanni. Treating the perennial tale of the seducer who finally gets his just deserts, Don Giovanni premiered to rapturous acclaim in Prague in 1787. The opera’s philosophical and supernatural elements have made it significant in the history of aesthetics, while the masterful blend of intense drama with buffa caricatures and ribald subject matter have extended its impact to all levels of culture. The plot follows the Don in his various romantic intrigues, close escapes, and ultimate damnation at the hands of an avenging father.
The overture seeks to capture both sides of the anti-hero, Giovanni. On one hand, he is charismatic, virile, and filled with an irrepressible joy for life. On the other hand, he flaunts conventional morality and treats other people as objects merely of servitude or conquest. Mozart begins the overture with Giovanni’s darker side in two powerful D-minor chordal outbursts. These signature chords recur at the opera’s climactic scene, when the ghostly commendatore confronts our hero for his sins. These gestures are answered by a variation on the “lament bass” progression, in which the harmonic foundation falls chromatically by step from tonic down to the dominant. A third idea emerges in the striking augmented 2nds in first violin with an evocative, needling sixteenth-note figure in second violin. Mozart carefully controls the pacing and use of ascending and descending lines. For instance, note how the wavelike scales in the flute and first violin mark an overall ascending progression from D to A, with each chromatic step filled in along the way. All this material functions as a slow introduction to the sonata-form main body in D major. The brilliant major-mood main theme could just as easily have stepped off the pages of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Below the sunny surface, one finds subtle details that betray the master’s hand: his use of contrasting rhythms between upper and lower strings; broad gestures answered by rapid, staccato ones; a crystal-clear tonal structure that allows us to follow the exposition, development, and recapitulation—all within a taut, six-minute overture.

(c) Jason Stell