This is the complete orchestral and vocal score of Mozart's Don Giovanni, considered by many to be the greatest opera ever written. This edition contains all the music Mozart wrote for Don Giovanni, both for the original version performed in Prague (1787) and the alterations―Don Ottavio's aria "Dalla sua pace," Elvira's aria (and its transposition to D Major) "Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata," Zerlina and Leporello's duet "Per queste tue manine," the cut in the finale―made for the first Viennese performance six months later, as well as the concert ending of the overture. The editors, Georg Schünemann and Kurt Soldan, worked directly from Mozart's autograph manuscript and from early copies made under Mozart's supervision, correcting many errors that had persisted since Mozart's time. An extensive commentary lists all vague or controversial elements the editors encountered in the score. In addition the complete Italian libretto and stage directions by Lorenzo Da Ponte and a German translation of the vocal text by Georg Schünemann have also been included. Do not confuse this with a piano rendering; it is the full orchestral score. In addition to its obvious uses for study, this score is also an indispensable associate for anyone listening to the music. In no other manner can the listener or student keep full awareness of the many elements that make up this opera.
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, the Austrian composer, toured Europe with his son, child prodigy, noted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who gracefully and imaginatively refined the classical style with symphonies, concertos, operas, Masses, sonatas, and chambers among his 626 numbered works.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart prolifically influenced the era. Many persons acknowledged this pinnacle of piano and choral music. His popularity most endures.
Mozart showed earliest ability. From the age of five years in 1761 already competently on keyboard and violin performed before royalty. At seventeen years in 1773, a court musician in Salzburg engaged him, who restlessly traveled always abundantly in search of a better position.
Mozard visited Vienna in 1781; Salzburg dismissed his position, and he chose to stay in the capital and achieved fame but little financial security over the rest of life. The final years in Vienna yielded his many best-known Requiem. People much mythologized the circumstances of his early death. Constanze Mozart, his wife, two sons survived him.
Mozart always learned voraciously and developed a brilliance and maturity that encompassed the light alongside the dark and passionate; a vision of humanity, "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute," informed the whole. He profoundly influenced all subsequent western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote on his own early in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Franz Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."
(The voice) of Truth and Goodness was higher in the end &; *** Between the love of life and the fact of death ...The virtue .. The love .. The justice .. The conscience I love this opera :) <3
صوت الحق و الخير كان اعلى في النهاية &; *** ما بين عشق الحياة و حقيقة الموت .. الفضيلة .. الحب .. العدالة .. الضمير كانت اوبرا (دون جيوفاني) او (دون جوان) لموتسارت و اللي صورت نهاية سيئة و بشعة حتى على المستوى الروحي و الديني لدون جوان ، قد يكون المقصود منها هنا مقصد معنوي فقط نتيجة لعذاب الضمير و الخوف من الاعداء اللي بيطاردوه ، الا انها و في كل الحالات كانت نهاية مناسبة وضعها موتسارت في نسخته الأوبرالية الخاصة عن (دون جوان) ، مناسبة لذلك الرجل القح المبتذل اللي احترف اغواء النساء .. و اللي عمد الى اغتصاب احدى الفلاحات في يوم زفافها أوبرا رائعة :) <3
Ok, so, I didn't actually read this. But I just saw it, and I feel like that counts for something. The libretto is hardly ever the chief virtue of an opera, and Don Giovanni is no exception. Regardless of its dubious ~literary merit~, I loved this opera, with all of its ridiculous melodrama and bawdy humor (he had 1,003 girls in Spain!!). The ending was SO WILD. Like, by some turn of events, Don Giovanni ends up in a ghostly statuary, and then this statue starts talking, then he invites the statue to dinner, then blah blah blah some time elapses, then Giovanni is eating dinner with some ladies (wink) and the statue actually shows up!! So Giovanni is super spooked but manages to be like "hey do you want some food?" and the statue is like "no. I am nourished by heaven." so Giovanni's like THEN WHY THE HECK DID YOU COME TO DINNER then the statue is like YA GOTTA REPENT FOR YOUR SINS and then Giovanni is like NAH and then the statue banishes him to hell (the Metropolitan Opera's production had some crazy pyrotechnics at this point, I could even feel the heat way, way up in the high balcony where us poor people are banished to) and yeah, that was pretty much the end of that. Confusing and shoddily written? Sure. Exciting? HELL YEAH. Don Giovanni is the prodigal rake that you love to hate and hate to.... wait, you don't hate to love him. You just hate him. He's an asshole. But I wouldn't have it any other way. The music is infallible. I mean, it's Mozart.
I think Don Giovanni (the opera, not the character) makes an inquiry into whether the height of certain human emotions make sense. There are a multitude of serious emotions in the opera and they are believable, due to the music and the libretto, but the opera questions each nevertheless. Inquires about the multitude of emotions.
Non sono un amante della lirica, ma quest'opera l'ho trovata molto piacevole e divertente. Il personaggio di Don Giovanni è ormai diventato leggenda, ma quello che ho preferito è senza dubbio Leporello. È un testo molto veloce, che si legge con rapidità e leggerezza ma che, se studiato più a fondo, mostra aspetti più complessi rispetto a quelli che appaiono in superficie.
Ich habe das Libretto als Vorbereitung für die Oper gelesen, um auch zu verstehen, was da auf der Bühne so passiert ;) Mir hat es sehr gut gefallen, die Geschichte hat Charme und Witz und doch auch Tragik. Das Ende fand ich etwas schnell und wirr, aber trotzdem hatte ich Spaß und habe das Buch in einem Rutsch durchgelesen.
Mozart's dark opera "Don Giovanni" is my favorite Mozart opera of all time. I really really loved the libretto, and Bleiler's translation was an excellent one. I couldn't resist watching the opera too! The scene with the Commendatore (The Statue) is powerful and amazing!
Judging from reviews of this and other librettos, most people read librettos before seeing an opera performed. I read this for other reasons. My review is based solely on reading the text, and not off seeing a performance, listening to a recording, nor reading sheet music.
Reading it as text, I found it to be an engaging, evocative story, and a shocking one. When I was a child, I heard stories and jokes about “Don Juan� and what a great ladies� man he was. After reading this I am stunned by what a wicked sex predator he was, at least in this telling of his story. He is no ladies� man. Calling him a seducer would be generous. He is a rapist. And a liar. And a terrible boss who treats his servant like cannon fodder. He is a powerful, wealthy nobleman, so that makes him attractive to some impressionable people. He can also be bold, amusing, and confident, but that’s where his attractive traits end.
His toady Leporello is more sympathetic because he has to put up with all of Don Giovanni’s wickedness and lie for him. But he comes across as a coward who will not stand up for what is right. Servants back then were in very inferior positions, but this guy seems totally gutless.
The women characters come across better, but mostly as victims. Donna Anna is a suffering young woman whose attack by Giovanni on her and her father start the action of the story. Donna Elvira sounds early alarm bells about Don Giovanni, and she appears to be the heroin of the story until she crumbles in the second act by falling for Giovanni’s lies one more time. Giovanni also targets peasant girl Zerlina. Without saying what happens to her, she and her fiancé are fun characters to root for.
There was a great deal of repetition of words in the text, which is normal for music, but it doesn’t serve much purpose and even gets tedious while reading it. For example, Don Giovanni says “Don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy!� (Act II, Sc. 1) and repeats that several times. There are dozens of examples just like this throughout the libretto, including scenes where different characters repeat the exact same lines together or in succession. At first I read all the lines, treating it like poetry, but after a while I began skipping over multiple repeated phrases.
The story relies on a few of the same dopey contrivances that Shakespeare and a lot of other people must have used in comedies for centuries back then like mistaken identities and talking ghosts. I wouldn’t care for those elements in current literature but I’ll give the old masters a pass.
A few words about the format of this book from “The Dover Opera Libretto Series.� Italian lyrics are in the left column and English on the right of each page. I found it very readable. The spacing was clear. It was easy to tell who is speaking or singing. The translation and alignment must have been carefully done because it is easy to look to the left and see what the original lines were in Italian. Although I do not speak Italian, it is easy to pick out which words are which if you know something about romance languages. My only quibble was that at times I didn’t know if the stage directions were written by Lorenzo Da Ponte or translator/editor Ellen Bleiler herself.
All in all, I enjoyed reading this and I found the end to be very satisfying. This is probably important not just for opera fans to read, but for anybody who wants a broader understanding of all writing styles and genres, including drama and music.
This review is about the "Don Giovanni" opera in the Czech National Marionette Theatre.
I would like to write a review about "Don Giovanni". Basically, Don Giovanni is an opera that consists of two acts, and it was made in 1787 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. To be specific, Mozart was a person who only composed the opera. It was Lorenzo Da Ponte who actually made the script for this opera. From now on, I will describe the summary of this play. "Don Giovanni" who is the main character of this play, is a noble who officially flirted with 640 women in Italy, 231 women in Germany, 100 women in France, 91 women in Turkey, and 1003 women in Spain (total: 2650 women). Which means he is an extraordinary "flirter". One day, he went to the chief knight's house to flirt with the woman. (but she had a fiance, who is Giovanni's friend) So he tried to disguise himself as her fiance but he killed her father. Well Giovanni also had his wife called "Dona Elby", who really abhors Giovanni, but simultaneously, loves him so much. Several days after, Giovanni went to the countryside, and again, flirted with a woman who just had marriage. Thanks to Dona, he failed. Later on, while 4 people got prepared to revenge on Giovanni, a stone figure (a ghost of a chief knight) takes Giovanni to the hell. While I were watching the play (well actually it was a marionette play), I was mesmerized by the controls of the workers, and some interesting elements between scenes. To illustrate, while the staff was changing the stage, a doll of Mozart came out and sprayed water to the audience, or danced. In addition, the workers there were very witty, by the fact that even though they made a single mistake, they tried to make that they were deliberately made to engage the audience more to the play. Even though the play was in Czech so I did not understand anything (well I had some research prior to the performance), the elements and the techniques in the play helped me fully understand. I give 9.5 out 10. (0.5 for I cant understand!! :D)
Kierkegaard brought me here. It somewhat annoys me when philosophers reference other artists (Kierkegaard does that A BUNCH), but that's my problem. Don Giovanni can be helpful if you want to understand his existentialism. This opera is a fine example of the binary between vice and virtue. The ironic thing is that this kind of stuff seems to romanticize the vice, even if you weren't thinking about it before, kind of like a sex anonymous meeting. So, you have to make it all the way through to where the horrific ending outweighs the sinful pleasures. I know this is ŷ, but I can't do this review without talking about the music. I listened to a highlights album version. It's an understatement to say this isn't the most accessible music for a casual listener. Since it's in Italian, I didn't know what they were singing. The only thing I could do was base it on what I read and imagine the story playing out with the male/female dynamic. The music is objectively great though, and I enjoy the singers' talent. I've never seen an opera, and since that's something Kierkegaard suggests doing, I've placed it on my bucket list. This was probably something Freddie Mercury listened to!
Excellent, the text is so good but the songs enrich the play so. A lot of darkness hidden in the comedy very fruitful look at deception of the comic and the profane. Don Giovanni ability to not relent shows the scenario of piling up sins. He is rather unforgivable but also we sort of root for him too.
Is there complacence in Donna Anna and Donna Elvira that is hidden. Does Donna Anna still feel attraction that she does not feel for Donn Octavio?
Tengo este libreto en una edición bilingüe y comentada por el prestigioso musicólogo Kurt Pahlen. Es absolutamente genial. Como si fuera poco, en 1994 el mismísimo Pahlen dio unas conferencias sobre Historia de la Ópera en el Salón Dorado del Teatro Colón, donde me autografió este libro. Un tesoro que guardo con mucho cariño.
Great story and would be great to see as an operatic performance, but I don't recommend reading the libretto. It's just like reading a bunch of repetitive song lyrics.
Read the Italian/English version in preparation for watching the Metropolitan Opera's new 2023 "Don Giovanni" production.
While I had listened and watched the opera several times before in my life, I highly recommend reading the libretto in the original, with translation, while listening to the music. This will enrich your appreciation of Mozart's composition and da Ponte's libretto and prepare you for the experience of watching the opera.
I can also recommend listening to the episodes on "Don Giovanni" in the Met Opera Guild podcast and any other resource online to really fall in love with this opera.
یک اُپرانامه به شدت جذاب📚😻اولین بار بود که اپرا نامه میخوندم خیلی جالب بود. این اپرا توسط موتسارت ساخته شده و داپونته متن برای این اپرا رو نوشته. در ابتدای کتاب توضیحات خیلی جالبی در مورد اپرانامه آورده شده که پیشنهاد میکنم حتما اول بخونیدش 😻📚 حالا بریم سراغ داستان💛 تا الان کلمه دون ژوانیسم روشنیدید� یا در موردش می دونید؟ سندرم دون ژوان اختلالیه که فرد تمایل به ارتباط نزدیک وکوتا� مدت با روشی اغواگرانه داره و تنها یک زمان کوتاه از شریک خودش لذت میبره و سریع از این رابطه خارج میشه و به کرات این اتفاق با افراد مختلف تکرار می شه. این داستان هم در مورد دون جووانی نجیب زاده جوان و زنباره است و این که در نهایت چه سرنوشتی در انتظارشه�