Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

A.C. Douglas is musing about the closing scenes of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

First, he argues that the Commendatore, in dragging the Don to his fiery fate, is engaged in a bit of free-lance vendetta and is not, as is sometimes thought, on a mission from God:

But to question further, why does the Commendatore repeatedly command Giovanni to repent? It's simply too much to imagine that the Commendatore has any interest whatsoever in saving Giovanni's soul (or whatever), or that the Commendatore is, for reasons hidden, an instrument or agent of God or heaven sent to accomplish that task. The idea is just too absurd, and effectively given lie to directly by the inscription on the Commendatore's graveyard statue.

No, the Commendatore is no-one's instrument or agent, and acting entirely in his own behalf and interests in the matter of Giovanni. And for the Commendatore, it's a win-win proposition. If he secures Giovanni's repentance for his crimes and way of life, he will have secured a confession from Giovanni that he wrongly killed the Commendatore, which in turn will secure for the Commendatore's unquiet spirit the release it requires, thereby permitting it to go to its eternal rest. If he fails to secure Giovanni's repentance, then the Commendatore's vengeance will be satisfied by Giovanni's descent into everlasting torment (which is also tacit confirmation of his guilt), which descent will also release the Commendatore's unquiet spirit from its earthly roaming, and permit it to go to its eternal rest. For the Commendatore it's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose deal, and the Commendatore doesn't give one fig how the coin lands.

I've got no problem whatever with this view and furthermore I don't think Mozart or Da Ponte went out of their way to camouflage it in any way. Nonetheless, Mr. Douglas posits that this interpretation went sailing right over the heads of many of Mozart's own audience and continues to do so today. Perhaps. I frankly don't know.

Mr. Douglas also has some excellent staging suggestions for the concluding sextet, in which the surviving characters wrap up their affairs and reflect on the lesson of the Don's demise. But he also suggests that Mozart is using this finale to slyly thumb his nose at the audience:

My take on that sextet is that, as I've above remarked, it's an extended, sardonic, and slightly malicious Mozartian joke; one targeted at the bourgeois sensibilities of the audiences of the time, and perpetrated at their expense by Mozart whether those audiences were made up of aristocrats, the middle-class, or the proles, all of which classes Mozart held pretty much in equal contempt (although for different reasons). Mozart knew precisely how those audiences would understand Giovanni's fate: as just recompense and divine retribution for his profligate, sinful, and even criminal life, and would understand it in that way not least because those audiences needed the comfort of knowing that Giovanni had met his end in such a morally decisive manner because of the threat such a one poses to the moral, social, and cultural status quo of the prevailing order. In that closing sextet, Mozart, with a sly and slightly malicious off-stage grin undetectable by most of his audiences, assures those audiences that Giovanni has been dealt with fittingly, and now everything is once more restored to proper bourgeois order with nothing of consequence left to threaten or disturb their good and just bourgeois sleep.

I dunno - if there is a joke about the "proper bourgeois order" there, it sure doesn't start with the final sextet, because it's been demonstrated time and again throughout the opera that all of the characters have flaws and imperfections of some kind or another: Don Ottavio is a hey-you. There is a good deal of ambiguity about exactly what the Don was doing in Donn'Anna's room at the beginning of the opera and what she actually thought of it at the time. Donna Elvira is a crackpot ("e pazza, amici miei"), Zerlina an opportunistic minx, Masetto a hot-headed dolt and Leporello a mercenary. If these are the pillars of the bourgeois world, Mozart's shown us the cracks in their plaster long before they start singing the old song about bad things coming to bad people. But perhaps I misunderstand the point.

Anyhoo, go read the rest.