A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their MusicKrehbiel, Henry Edward
History
A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music
Krehbiel, Henry Edward
Operas -- Stories, plots, etc.
love to the care of her friends and goes to denounce the libertine
to the officers of the law.
The last scene is reached. Don Giovanni, seated at his table, eats,
drinks, indulges in badinage with his servant, and listens to the
music of his private band. The musicians play melodies from popular
operas of the period in which Mozart wrote--not Spanish melodies of
the unfixed time in which the veritable Don Juan may have lived:--
[Musical excerpts--From Martin's "Una cosa rara." From "Fra i due
litiganti" by Sarti. From "Nozze di Figaro."]
Mozart feared anachronisms as little as Shakespeare. His Don
Giovanni was contemporary with himself and familiar with the
repertory of the Vienna Opera. The autograph discloses that the
ingenious conceit was wholly Mozart's. It was he who wrote the words
with which Leporello greets the melodies from "Una cosa rara," "I
due Litiganti," and "Le Nozze di Figaro," and when Leporello hailed
the tune "Non piu andrai" from the last opera with words "Questo poi
la conosco pur troppo" ("This we know but too well"), he doubtless
scored a point with his first audience in Prague which the German
translator of the opera never dreamed of. Even the German critics
of to-day seem dense in their unwillingness to credit Mozart with a
purely amiable purpose in quoting the operas of his rivals, Martin
and Sarti. The latter showed himself ungrateful for kindnesses
received at Mozart's hands by publicly denouncing an harmonic
progression in one of the famous six quartets dedicated to Haydn as
a barbarism, but there was no ill-will in the use of the air from
"I due Litiganti" as supper music for the delectation of the Don.
Mozart liked the melody, and had written variations on it for the
pianoforte.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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