








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.2 (2007) 173–190] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.173 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Sincerity and Seduction in Don Giovanni

JAmES H. JoHNSoN

Boston University

This article considers the nature of seduction in Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ 
in light of recent musicological scholarship on the title character. Using 
Casanova’s memoirs as a point of reference, Johnson argues that Mozart 
and da Ponte deliberately employ a tone of sincerity that keeps to the sur-
face in conveying Giovanni’s words but reveals little about his motivations 
and withholds ultimate judgment about his character. Johnson contends 
that this tone of sincerity produces a powerfully seductive effect upon listen-
ers as well and is a major factor in the polarized critical reception of the 
opera that continues to this day. The article combines musical, literary, and 
dramatic analysis and contains musical examples from ‘Don Giovanni’ 
and ‘Così fan tutte.’

one point of entry to mozart’s Don Giovanni is to consider Beethoven’s 
sentiment, expressed late in life, that the sacred art of music “ought 
never to permit itself to be degraded to the position of being a foil 
for so scandalous a subject.”1  Beethoven’s indignation grew from his 
own religious view of art.  He wrote to the Archduke Rudolf in 1823: 
“There can be no loftier mission than to come nearer than other men 
to the Divinity and to disseminate the divine rays among mankind.” 
Despite the opera’s divinely punitive ending—with Don Giovanni sent 
to hell for his crimes and the other characters pledging to keep to the 
straight and narrow—there is much to offend along the way. Beethoven 
was not alone in censuring mozart for depicting the life of a libertine. 
John Ruskin worded his condemnation in superlatives: “No such spec-
tacle of unconscious (and in that unconsciousness all the more fearful) 
moral degradation of the highest faculty to the lowest purpose can be 
found in history.”2

The modern version of this view objects not to immorality per se, 



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but to sexism. The philosopher Daniel Herwitz argues that, despite 
ample proofs of Don Giovanni’s wickedness, the effect of the opera is 
to praise and elevate him. This for Herwitz implicates its composer. 
“The Don makes the music more sexist because the Don is also a rapist, 
a bastard to women, and a man who beats up other men.” Suggesting 
that the collaboration of da Ponte and mozart “betray[s] the sexism of 
their male fantasy,” Herwitz concludes that the opera “identifies the 
character of the Don with the music that characterizes him, which also 
conflates him with the composer himself ” (Herwitz 2006, 133, 134).

To appreciate such sentiments, you need go no further than Lepore-
llo’s “Catalogue” aria. Here the servant proudly enumerates his mas-
ter’s conquests: in Italy six hundred and forty, in Germany two hun-
dred thirty-one, in France one hundred, in Turkey ninety-one, “but 
in Spain there are already one thousand and three!” Don Giovanni 
conquers country wenches, chambermaids, and city ladies; countesses, 
baronesses, marchionesses, and princesses; slender ones in summer, 
plumpish ones in winter, and older ones for the sake of the list. But 
“sua passion predominante è la giovin principiante,” Leporello sings: 
“His overriding passion is for virgins.” Here as elsewhere the librettist 
Lorenzo da Ponte skates on the far side of sexual innuendo to approach 
vulgarity. “Provided she wears a skirt, you know what he’s going to do!” 
(mozart and da Ponte 1974, I:v, 62–75).3

The way Giovanni speaks of those 2,065 women is at least as startling 
as their number. “It’s all part of love,” he says. “If a man is faithful only 
to one, he is cruel to all the others. I, a man of boundless generosity, 
love every one of them” (mozart and da Ponte 1974, II:i, 233–35). 
Surely the view is a knowing lie, or perhaps self-deceit. Either way, it 
keeps him from thinking twice. But as is well known, Søren Kierke-
gaard proposed a third possibility, which in fact explains Giovanni’s 
successes more credibly than either deceit or delusion. Namely, that 
what he says is true: that seduction is a misnomer, that his love is self-
less, and that constancy to one would deprive all others. Kierkegaard 
takes this position in Either/Or:

I should rather not call him a deceiver. To be a seducer requires a 
certain amount of reflection and consciousness, and as soon as this is 



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present, then it is proper to speak of cunning and intrigues and crafty 
plans. This consciousness is lacking in Don Giovanni. Therefore, he 
does not seduce. He desires, and this desire acts seductively.

(Kierkegaard 1959, 1:97)
Penetrating Don Giovanni’s real motivations is not as simple as it 

seems. other nineteenth-century commentators in the spirit of Ki-
erkegaard found no cause for censure.4 By contrast, more recent com-
mentators have taken a step back from accentuating the heroic in Don 
Giovanni. Some have pointed to a curious absence at the heart of the 
opera. In these readings, far from being the embodiment of a heroic 
ideal, Don Giovanni is all surface and no substance. So Bernard Wil-
liams writes that Don Giovanni “seems to have no depth adequate 
to the work in which he plays the central role.” It is not that there is 
something hidden in Giovanni’s soul, Williams observes; instead, he 
is “virtually characterless” (1981, 82).  Wye Jamison Allanbrook calls 
Giovanni No-man. His actions, she writes, do not rise to the level of 
the grand or tragic: “he is not evil but banal, not noble but punctilious, 
and without fear where true courage would discern what properly is to 
be feared” (1983, 218).

For the musicologist Joseph Kerman, Giovanni’s blankness explains 
why nineteenth-century thinkers so readily projected the horrors and 
ideals of their age onto the opera. It also accounts for what Kerman 
believes are substantial weaknesses in the work. While the music of 
Don Giovanni is peerless in mozart’s entire repertoire—it is “mozart’s 
richest score” and the “dearest of all his operas to the musician”—its 
dramatic realization is severely flawed (Kerman 1988, 99). According 
to Kerman, da Ponte faltered by inadequately conveying charm and 
ingenuity in Giovanni, and mozart compounded the weakness by add-
ing very little to his character musically. The result is an altogether 
underwhelming presence for a mozartian hero.

Giovanni has a single solo aria that might qualify as genuine self-
expression, the orgasmic “Fin ch’han dal vino,” which comes mid-
way through the opera. (He sings his other two arias, “Deh vieni alla 
finestra” and “metà di voi,” disguised as his servant Leporello.) “Fin 
ch’han dal vino” is relentless and obsessive, without subtlety, comment, 



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or development. For Kerman, it is “a jingle that never evolves” (1990, 
120). “The singular fact is that until the end almost all of the action 
and musical expression goes to illuminate the people with whom he is 
involved, not Don Giovanni himself,” Kerman writes. “This is a dra-
matic mistake” (1988, 102).

In my view, this is not a dramatic mistake. Da Ponte and mozart 
knew exactly what they were doing.  Instead of weakening the opera, 
the cipher at its center is the key to its particular power. The view de-
rives from the observation that Don Giovanni employs the secret of all 
great lovers: sincerity. Sincerity is not self-expression. It is as foreign to 
the principled earnestness of the nineteenth century as it is to our own 
time’s demand for authenticity. In Lionel Trilling’s classic definition, 
sincerity is “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (1972, 2; 
see also Johnson 2005).  A person who is sincere need not be consistent 
in his claims.  He need only believe what he says—truly and fully—in 
the moment of utterance. And that might well be at odds with other 
sincere claims before and after. It is Don Giovanni’s unfailing sincerity 
of tone that makes grasping his character so difficult.

Da Ponte’s fellow Venetian Giacomo Casanova maintains this same 
tone of sincerity for the length of his twelve-volume autobiography 
as he recounts his own romantic conquests, which occur on average 
about once every thirty pages. Ingenuous and immediate, Casanova 
seems to tell us everything, including his setbacks and humiliations, 
his illnesses and debilities, each time he is impotent, and the shame 
he feels when visiting prostitutes. Throughout the Memoirs Casanova 
repeats a single theme: that he is neither a seducer nor a deceiver. He 
writes near the end of the work: “I venture to say that I was often 
virtuous in the act of vice. Seduction was never characteristic of me; 
for I have never seduced except unconsciously, being seduced myself.”  
The “professional seducer is an abominable creature,” he adds, a “true 
criminal,” and the “enemy of the object on which he has his designs” 
(1966–71, 12: 111).

The fascination in Casanova’s autobiography lies in how little this 
man’s actions seem to match his declared motivations. He cites with 
incredulity an enemy who has deemed him a liar, slanderer, counter-



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feiter, and spy. The denunciation that brought his arrest and impris-
onment in the Venetian Leads accused him of sorcery, irreligion, and 
dissipation. And he gives ample cause in the course of his writing for 
believing such charges, with straightforward accounts of sleeping with 
fourteen-year-olds, inventing fanciful stories, spying, counterfeiting, 
attempting black magic, and using fictitious names. Still, he dismiss-
es the accusations as slander. Casanova was a chameleon in a society 
whose colors were largely fixed. over the course of his life, he forged 
a series of identities consistent only in denying who he really was, the 
neglected son of a theater-girl. By perpetually believing what he said, 
Casanova insisted that he was honorable and honest, even as his sto-
ries changed. Consider his defense of inventing the name Seingalt: “I 
assumed it because it is mine….There is nothing more true than my 
name” (8: 135).  How could anyone call him an imposter?

Assessing whether Casanova “really means” what he says is futile. In 
his Memoirs, he is in perpetual control of his rhetoric, and the autobio-
graphical genre means that there is never a second opinion. one need 
only to consider other genres to see how sincerity of tone, especially 
among seducers, might mask thoroughly deceitful intentions. one 
such seducer is the Vicomte de Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos’ Li-
aisons dangereuses. Through its multiple voices, Laclos’ epistolary form 
reveals what Casanova’s autobiography does not. “Permit me, mad-
ame, to open my heart to you,” Valmont writes to his principal victim, 
the Présidente de Tourvel. She is taken in and lauds his “honest sincer-
ity” to a companion. But Valmont’s letters to the marquise de merteuil 
show him calculating at every step, driven by vengeance and the sheer 
will to corrupt.

Ah! may she surrender, but may she fight; may she have the means to 
resist without the means to prevail; may she come to savor the senti-
ment of her own weakness and be obliged to acknowledge her de-
feat…. This project is sublime, is it not? (Laclos 1979, 74, 33, 52) 

In Don Giovanni, da Ponte and mozart follow the technique of Casa-
nova rather than that of Laclos. With the thunderous opening chords 
of the overture, Giovanni’s damnation seems sure, and yet in most 
moments we cannot discern whether his sincerity is honest or a mask. 



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Nor can the other characters. The peasant-girl Zerlina is on the way to 
her own wedding when Don Giovanni takes her hand, tells her she is 
destined for higher things, and promises marriage. only a timely in-
tervention by Donna Elvira keeps Zerlina out of Leporello’s catalogue. 
For her part, Donna Elvira is already on the list and eager to declare to 
everyone she sees what a monster Don Giovanni is. Nevertheless, late 
in the opera, she is still ready to believe that Don Giovanni truly loves 
her. For Donna Anna, assessing Giovanni’s sincerity is altogether more 
urgent. In the opening scene, a cloaked intruder forces his way into her 
room, either rapes or attempts to rape her, and stabs her father as he 
rushes to her aid. It is of course Don Giovanni, though she does not 
know it at the time. When she encounters him only days later, he asks 
with affecting concern, “Who was the villain that dared to upset the 
calm of your life?” (mozart and da Ponte 1974, I:xi–xii, 101–2).

Asking whether Giovanni’s sincerity is honest or a mask is another 
way of asking if he genuinely believes what he says when he says it. 
If he believes his words, then perhaps Kierkegaard is right and he is a 
sheer force of nature: unreflective, true to his desires, and at least in this 
one respect without censure. If Giovanni does not believe his words, 
then he is a master of deceit and da Ponte is in on the game. In either 
case, Giovanni’s apparent sincerity is powerfully convincing. Part of 
the strange spell of mozart’s Don Giovanni is how easy it is to disregard 
the fact that its principal character is a would-be rapist and a killer. 
The libretto possesses a cavalier bluntness, and yet even its brutalities 
can seem strangely untroubling.  “L’ha voluto,” Don Giovanni says to 
Leporello just after the Commandante’s death. “He asked for it” is the 
way Leporello takes it, but the Italian might as easily mean, “She asked 
for it,” with reference to whatever has just happened in Donna Anna’s 
bedchamber (I:ii, 34).  From start to finish, Don Giovanni’s actions are 
on full view, and still he seems more a likeable rogue than a criminal. 
Instead of condemning him we’re amused, fascinated, intrigued.

Why is this? His sincerity may very well account for his successes 
within the drama, but it cannot fully explain our own fascination with 
his exploits. In my view, this effect lies with the music.

Just as da Ponte never reveals what Don Giovanni is really think-



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ing, mozart keeps resolutely to the surface in his musical depictions. 
The music does not comment upon Giovanni’s actions, much less pass 
judgment or condemn. In fact, it backs him up at every turn. mozart 
certainly had the ability to offer such comment had he wanted. His 
Così fan tutte, for instance, an opera filled with dissimulation, carries 
musical clues that comment on the deceit. When Guglielmo and Fer-
rando appear in “Turkish” disguises to test the fidelity of their lovers, 
Fiordiligi orders them to leave and declares her own steadfast fidelity. 
At the word “fede” (faith), a small wavering gesture sounds in the vio-
lins; at the word “diede” (pledged), two measures later, the half-step 
fluctuation recurs in thirds (see Example 1). In itself, the gesture is per-
haps unremarkable, but it reappears during the servant Despina’s lusty 
recommendation of deceit to the two sisters (see Examples 2 and 3). 
And later, as Ferrando presses close to Fiordiligi and pleads for her af-
fection, the same figure in the violins announces what she cannot bring 
herself to say. “my God, the way you look at me and sigh!” Ferrando 
responds. “With that look and those dear sighs, a sweet ray shines into 
my heart.”5 What was first a tiny doubt now signals surrender (see Ex-
ample 4). Daniel Heartz points to a similar instance in the orchestra 
when Guglielmo promises a feast in honor of Venus early in the opera. 

Example 1. From “Temerari,” Così fan tutte.



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Example 2. From “Una donna a quinici anni,” Così fan tutte.

Example 3. From “Una donna a quinici anni,” Così fan tutte.

Example 4. From “Barbara!,” Così fan tutte.



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The pattern of sixteenth notes in the first violins recalls the “Turkish” 
music in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Heartz observes, and may be 
interpreted as “a hint of the disguises to come” (1990, 239).

In Don Giovanni, by contrast, there are no moments when the or-
chestra conveys the thoughts or reveals the intentions of its principal 
character. This is the musical version of sincerity. The orchestra gives us 
no reason to doubt the truth of Giovanni’s words. For this reason, it is 
not enough to say that mozart’s music abets the attempted seductions 
on the stage. The music reaches beyond the flickering virtue of the dra-
ma’s characters to draw us into Giovanni’s tainted moral universe. The 
real seducer in Don Giovanni is mozart, and the seduction is not a fic-
tion. This is what Beethoven must have meant in deploring the work.

Consider the scene in Act Two when Donna Elvira, who until now 
has spared no occasion to curse her lover as a traitor, appears at a win-
dow and, believing herself alone, sings that she still has feelings for 
him (mozart and da Ponte 1974, II: ii, 235–45). Her musical line—
hesitant, broken, not properly a melody—conveys the nature of her 
thoughts (see Example 5). Don Giovanni is below, and he seizes his 
chance to beg forgiveness and declare that he also still loves her. He 
does this in the very melody she has sung as the tonality shifts from A 
to E major (see Example 6). The new key is related to A but brighter, 
which quickens the attention without drawing attention. The musical 
line is the same, but in Giovanni’s hands its silences prompt Donna 
Elvira to reply. This is Giovanni’s gift:  to read another’s heart and reply 
as a kindred spirit.

This happens not just with his words but with his music. Like Casa-
nova, Don Giovanni assumes the shades of his surroundings, slipping 
into buffa when he is with Leporello, a virtuosic seria style with El-
vira, and a folk-like simplicity with Zerlina. When Giovanni swaps 
his clothes with Leporello the better to woo a servant-girl, mozart of-
fers the musical equivalent by hiding the orchestra behind a whispered 
pizzicato and giving the accompaniment to a mandolin. In fact, Don 
Giovanni is the only character in the opera for whom mozart has not 
fashioned a characteristic style consistent with social rank.6 For Joseph 
Kerman, this is an element of his incomplete depiction, and to claim 



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Example 5. From “Ah, taci, ingiusto core,” Don Giovanni.

Example 6. From “Ah, taci, ingiusto core,” Don Giovanni.

that is an artistic strength is “to argue ab vacuo”: “In opera we trust 
what is done most firmly by the music” (1988, 102).  on the contrary. 
This very musical detachment allows mozart to achieve his most con-
vincing effects.

When Don Giovanni comes to the payoff line in the scene with Don-



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na Elvira—“Discendi, o gioia bella,” “Come down, my joy!”—the key 
modulates a second time, now to C major (see Example 7). A melody 
blossoms from the musical material of Donna Elvira’s thoughts, but 
now, spoken aloud as it were by Don Giovanni, it is altogether more 
sumptuous than in her first halting phrases. The earlier shift from A to 
E is subtle; this one, from E to C, is bold. The new key, relatively re-
mote from E, is unexpected though not jarring and, while still bright, 
is considerably warmer. The instrumental modulation that prepares his 
line enacts Giovanni’s command: the strings descend stepwise. The ef-
fect is ravishing.

All of this happens while Don Giovanni and Leporello continue to 
talk out of Elvira’s hearing, which mozart sets in a rapid buffa style, 
the speech-like patter of Italian comic opera. mozart’s astonishing dra-
matic control is on full display here. Giovanni mimics the musical 
styles of all whom he encounters with such sincerity that we—not just 
they—believe him.

The opera contains many such instances of mozart’s seduction. “Là 
ci darem la mano,” the aria in which Giovanni promises to marry the 
peasant Zerlina, narrates her surrender in a sequence that exercises 
strong musical persuasion. “There we shall join hands, there you will 
say yes,” Giovanni sings of his country house in a tune of childlike in-
nocence. “Look, it is not far, come my sweet, let’s go.” The slow duple 
meter is soothing and gentle, and Giovanni’s simple stanza, just as with 
Donna Elvira, creates the musical expectation for a reply, which Zer-
lina readily gives: “I want to and yet I don’t; my heart has misgivings; 
I should indeed be happy, but he might be bluffing me.” The music 

Example 7. From “Ah, taci, ingiusto core,” Don Giovanni.



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conveys Zerlina’s indecision in a series of faltering, downward steps in 
the next exchange. Come, Giovanni coos, I will change your life. She 
stammers, “But I pity masetto…. Then quick, I’m not strong” (I: ix, 
93–8).

Now mozart begins to work on us. In the second stanza, he returns 
to the opening innocent tune, but Giovanni has to sing only two lines 
instead of four to get Zerlina to answer. This doubles the pace of the 
conversation and stirs anticipation. mozart adds a nice dramatic touch 
by gracing Giovanni’s lines with a flute and grounding Zerlina’s with a 
bassoon. We feel them coming together even if we do not consciously 
register why.

And as the meter shifts to a pastoral 6/8, they do come together. 
The translator Avril Bardoni has them saying: “Then come, then come, 
my sweetheart, to remedy the torment of an innocent love!”7  Zerlina 
may well be swept away and think her love is pure—and, whatever his 
true intentions, Giovanni echoes that sentiment—but the sexual na-
ture of the scene is intimated in that strange last line: “a ristorar le pene 
d’un innocente amor.” The cognate “to restore” (or even “to refresh” or 
“to revitalize”) is much closer to ristorare than “to remedy,” Bardoni’s 
choice. Lurking near le pene, pains, is il pene, penis. In its context, ris-
torare may be meant to carry a rather more pointed physical connota-
tion:  not to remedy, but to slake and reawaken.

At the words “innocente amor,” the violins trace a brief chromatic 
descent that is conspicuously out of character with the happy duet 
(see Example 8). Is it a warning that Giovanni’s intentions are not at 
all innocent? Perhaps. But given what we later learn about Zerlina, it 
might well be an indication that Giovanni and Zerlina both know, and 
both embrace, what would have happened in the big country house 
had Donna Elvira not come along. Daniel Heartz links that chromatic 
descent to moments in “Fin ch’han dal vino,” when Giovanni orders 
Leporello to bring girls off the streets to his party, and in the sextet 
“Ah non lasciarmi!” late in the opera. In that ensemble, Donna Elvira 
believes she is alone in the dark with Giovanni, whom she once again 
calls her husband; she also declares that she is scared to death. “In this 
opera chromatic lines spell death,” Heartz writes, “but also the related 



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phenomenon of love death, or the sexual act…. If the censors had 
only known how suggestive of the erotic mozart’s music could be, they 
would surely have banned it” (1990, 181).

Don Giovanni’s ability to imitate the natural temperament of oth-
ers is fully grasped when Zerlina begs forgiveness from masetto, but 
the sequence also reveals what she has learned from Giovanni. “Batti, 
batti” is cast in the same reassuring duple meter as “Là ci darem,” and it 
possesses a similarly innocent tune. The lyrics begin, “Beat me, maset-
to, beat your poor Zerlina! I shall stand here like a lambkin waiting for 
your blows.” At the end of the aria, Zerlina moves to the same pastoral 
6/8 that she and Giovanni came to. Here she sings, “Let’s make up, 
my dear! We want to pass our days and nights in joy and gaiety!” (mo-
zart and da Ponte 1974, I: xvi, 148–56).  There’s no reason to doubt 
her sentiments, judging by the words or the music, but from now on 
masetto is suspicious.

And so am I. “He didn’t even touch my fingertips!” Zerlina tells 
masetto (I: xvi, 147). Really? From its opening words, their duet was 
about joining hands! When she next sings to masetto, who has been 
roughed up by Giovanni, the balm she offers is overtly sexual. “Touch 
me here,” she sings seven times, repeating “here” another five times for 
good measure. (Where is up to the director.) Zerlina’s aria illustrates 
how Giovanni’s pleasingly reassuring tone becomes so corrosive. once 
suspicions arise, you’re either a dupe or a cynic. Donna Elvira’s deter-
mination to resist both helps to explain her vacillation throughout the 

Example 8. From “Là ci darem la mano,” Don Giovanni.



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opera, cursing Giovanni as a monster one moment and eager to marry 
him the next. Sadly, one has to wonder whether some version of her 
suffering awaits masetto.8 

mozart remains faithful to Giovanni’s unfailing tone of sincerity 
throughout the opera, but in one extraordinary moment the composer 
allows the incompatibility of his claims to show. It comes in the tour de 
force setting of three orchestras playing three dances in three different 
meters (mozart and da Ponte 1974, I: xx, 180–227). When Donna 
Anna and Donna Elvira come disguised to Don Giovanni’s ball and 
pair off briefly to dance, an onstage orchestra plays a minuet, the most 
aristocratic dance of the eighteenth century. When Don Giovanni seizes 
Zerlina to dance her straight out of the room, a second onstage orches-
tra plays a contredanse, a form whose roots are in the English country 
dance. Leporello grabs the peasant masetto in clownish parody, and a 
third orchestra strikes up a sprightly “German” dance.

Wonderment over mozart’s technical feat and the sheer fun of trying 
to hear each orchestra may distract from the larger point. Until now, 
Don Giovanni has kept the different versions of himself distinct in 
the minds of his companions. This is the instant when he is caught: 
Zerlina screams from offstage; Giovanni blames Leporello for the at-
tempted assault; and Elvira, Anna, and ottavio pull off their masks to 
sing, “Deceiver! Deceiver!” Here the music remains true to Giovanni’s 
separate stories, but the musical clash reveals them to be fundamen-
tally incompatible. Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s designation of Giovanni 
as No-man is relevant. From all we can tell, he doesn’t so much hide 
a lasting identity behind a series of masks as use the words and styles 
of others to construct serial selves. True, Zerlina has seen with horror 
what Giovanni’s promised marriage really means; and Donna Anna 
positively identifies him as her father’s killer. But the deepest question 
about Don Giovanni—whether he is an ingenuous lover or calculating 
liar—remains unanswered.

This is due in large part to music that was deliberately crafted to 
entice and ensnare its listeners. Despite Don Giovanni’s final dam-
nation to hell, the music throughout the opera reserves fundamental 
judgment about his character. Does this make mozart morally com-



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plicit with the offences of his creature? The comparison isn’t exact, but 
there is something to be learned from the calculating seducer’s mask 
of sincerity, namely, that one should beware of mistaking surface for 
substance. In a letter to his father, mozart boasted: “I can imitate and 
assimilate all kinds and styles of composition” (quoted in Heartz 1990, 
37). mozart’s facility in this regard was unparalleled, and nowhere is it 
more effectively deployed than in Don Giovanni. In a superb instance 
of form following content, mozart matched the sincerity of the char-
acter with music that was every bit as believable and—in the best pos-
sible sense—superficial. The music is constitutive of Don Giovanni’s 
several selves. To offer commentary or disclaimers would weaken the 
depiction.

mozart surely shared the prejudices of his own time, but in this case 
faulting him for endorsing objectionable values misses the point. mo-
zart rendered with utmost fidelity a man whose thoughts we never 
know. Using that music to pass judgment on the composer’s inner 
state is as groundless as locating within it Giovanni’s true intentions. 
Despite Beethoven’s criticism of the opera, he copied extracts into his 
sketch books in order to study its powers (see Lockwood 2003, 253). 
one of them, as potent today as it was in the eighteenth century, was 
the seductive appeal of sincerity.

End Notes

1. I am grateful to Thomas Kelly and to my colleagues from Boston University’s 
Core Curriculum—especially Bernard Prusak, Roger Shattuck, and Roye 
Wates—for their insights in conversations about teaching Don Giovanni.

2. Beethoven is quoted in Cooper 1985, 127, 118; Ruskin in Allanbrook 1983, 
364. 

3. The English translations from this opera are my own, although I have also 
frequently referred to that of Avril Bardoni, which appears in the booklet 
accompanying the recording of Don Giovanni by the Drottningholm Court 
Theatre orchestra and Chorus.

4. For example, Théophile Gautier wrote:  “It is not debauchery that drives him 
on; he seeks the dream of his heart with the obstinacy of a Titan who fears 
neither thunder nor lightning” (quoted in Williams 1981, 84).  In the tale 
“Don Juan” by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1984), the soprano playing Donna Anna 
appears in the narrator’s private box during a performance of the opera. Their 



188 Sincerity and Seduction in Don Giovanni

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007

brief conversation, experienced by the narrator as though in a dream, reveals the 
inner truth of Giovanni: in him is the divine but misdirected principle of love. 
Her mission is to redeem him. And her failed attempt to do so, coming too 
late in Giovanni’s headlong quest for genuine love, will end in her own death. 
George Bernard Shaw viewed Giovanni similarly, describing him as a Superman 
who rose above the small-minded world of bourgeois norms. See also Grey 
2006 and Allanbrook 1983, 216.

5. mozart and da Ponte 1952, I: xi, 115–16, II: i, 205–11, II: vi, 243. Another 
celebrated example that mozart knew comes in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, 
when orestes, terrorized by the Furies for having killed his mother, at last 
announces that peace has returned to his heart. But accompanying him in the 
orchestra is a churning, tumultuous rumble. “He is lying!” Gluck called out 
during a rehearsal in which the orchestra played the passage too softly. “He has 
just killed his mother!” See for this story La Comtesse de Genlis, in a footnote 
to the article “opéra,” in Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la cour 
(1818, 2: 12–13).

6. Wye Jamison Allanbrook makes this point well: “The vitality and spirit which 
have caused some to see Giovanni as hero, as life force, even as pure Intellect 
itself, are in reality relentless instinct and a talent for mimicry. Unlike the god 
Proteus, who, if his captor was patient, would at last assume his proper shape, 
Giovanni cannot, for he does not have one. A master of the forms, he is also 
radically dependent on them, for without them he would be invisible” (1983, 
286).

7. See the booklet accompanying the performance of Don Giovanni by the 
Drottningholm Court Theatre orchestra and Chorus, 90.

8. An essay by Berthold Hoeckner (2006) comes to different conclusions in 
arguing that Don Giovanni awakened Zerlina’s sexuality, but that Zerlina 
quickly matured to transform Giovanni’s manipulations and deceit into 
mutuality with masetto. For Hoeckner, the musical similarities between “Là 
ci darem” and “Batti, batti” signify maturity, and Zerlina’s promises to nurse 
masetto’s bruises are “peace-giving gestures.” masetto should hope that he is 
right.

References

Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
1983 Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro & Don Giovanni. Chicago, 

IL: University of Chicago Press.

Casanova, Giacomo, Chevalier de Seingalt
1966–71 History of My Life. 12 vols. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, NY: Har-



Johnson 189

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court, Brace & World, Inc.

Cooper, martin
1985 Beethoven: The Last Decades, 1817–1827. oxford: oxford University Press.

Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité, la comtesse de
1818 Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la cour. 2 vols. Paris: mon-

gié.

Grey, Thomas S.
2006 The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Giovanni in Romantic music 

and Culture. In The Don Giovanni Moment, ed. Lydia Goehr and Daniel 
Herwitz, 75–106. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Heartz, Daniel
1990 Mozart’s Operas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2006 Kierkegaard Writes His opera. In The Don Giovanni Moment, ed. Lydia 

Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, 119–136. New York, NY: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.

Hoeckner, Berthold
2006 Homage to Adorno’s “Homage to Zerlina.” In The Don Giovanni Moment, 

ed. Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, 211–23. New York, NY: Columbia 
University Press.

Hoffmann, E.T.A.
1984 Don Juan. In Deutsche Erzählungen/German Stories: A Bilingual Anthology, 

ed. Harry Steinhauer, 112–40. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Johnson, James H.
2005 Deceit and Sincerity in Early-modern Venice. Eighteenth-Century Studies 

38: 399–415.  doi:10.1353/ecs.2005.0027 http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/
ecs.2005.0027

Kerman, Joseph
1988 Opera as Drama.  Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1990 Reading Don Giovanni. In Don Giovanni:  Myths of Seduction and Be-

trayal, ed. Jonathan miller, 108–25. New York, NY: Schocken Books.

Kierkegaard, Søren
1959 Either/Or. 2 vols. Trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian marvin Swenson. 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.



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De Laclos, Choderlos
1979 Les Liaisons dangeureuses. Paris: Gallimard.

Lockwood, Lewis
2003 Beethoven: The Music and the Life. New York, NY and London: W. W. 

Norton.

mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Don Giovanni (CD recording). Drottningholm Court Theatre orchestra and 

Chorus, Arnold Östman, L’oiseau-Lyre 425 943-2.

mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus and Lorenzo da Ponte
1952 Così fan tutte. New York, NY: G. Schirmer. 
1974 Don Giovanni. Ed. Georg Schünemann and Kurt Soldan. New York, NY: 

Dover Publications.

Trilling, Lionel
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Williams, Bernard
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Rushton, 81–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


