2 The Immediate Erotic Stages Or The Musical Erotic
2 THE IMMEDIATE EROTIC STAGES
OR
THE MUSICAL EROTIC
PLATITUDINOUS INTRODUCTION
From the moment my soul was first overwhelmed in wonder at Mozart’s music, and bowed down to it in humble admiration, it has often been my cherished and rewarding pastime to reflect upon how that happy Greek view that calls the world a cosmos, because it manifests itself as an orderly whole, a tasteful and transparent adornment of the spirit that works upon and in it – upon how that happy view repeats itself in a higher order of things, in the world of ideals, how it may be a ruling wisdom there too, mainly to be admired for joining together those things that belong with one another: Axel with Valborg, Homer with the Trojan War, Raphael with Catholicism, Mozart with Don Juan. A wretched unbelief exists which seems to contain much healing power. It thinks such a connection fortuitous and sees in it no more than a lucky concurrence of the different forces at play in life. It thinks it an accident that the lovers get each other, an accident that they love each other; there were a hundred other girls he could have been just as happy with, whom he could have loved just as deeply. It thinks many a poet has existed who would have been just as immortal as Homer had that marvellous material not been seized on by him, many a composer just as immortal as Mozart had only the opportunity offered. Now this wisdom contains much solace and comfort for all mediocre minds since it lets them and like-minded spirits fancy that the reason they are not as celebrated as the celebrities is some confusion of fate, a mistake on the part of the world. This produces a most convenient optimism. But to every high-minded soul, to every optimate1 who does not feel bound to save himself in such a pitiable manner as by losing himself in contemplation of the great, it is of course repugnant, while his soul delights and it is his holy joy to see united those things that belong together. This is what fortune is, not in the fortuitous sense, and so it presupposes two factors whereas the fortuitous consists in the inarticulate interjections of fate. This is what historical fortune consists in: the divine conjuncture of historical forces, the heyday of historical time. The fortuitous has just one factor: the accident that the most remarkable epic theme imaginable fell to Homer’s lot in the shape of the history of the Trojan wars. In good fortune there are two: that the most remarkable epic material came to the lot of Homer. The accent lies here on Homer as much as on the material. In this lies the profound harmony that resounds in every work of art we call classic. And so too with Mozart: it is a piece of good fortune that what in a deeper sense is perhaps the only true musical subject was granted – to Mozart.
With his Don Giovanni Mozart enters that small, immortal band of men whose names, whose works, time will not forget, for they are remembered in eternity. And although, once having entered, it is a matter of indifference whether one is placed highest or lowest, because in a sense they are equally, because infinitely, high, and although it is childish to argue over the highest and the lowest place here, as if for one’s place in line at confirmation, I am still far too much a child, or rather, I am like a young girl in love with Mozart and must have him placed highest whatever the cost. And I shall appeal to the deacon and the priest and the dean and the bishop and the entire consistory, and I shall beg and beseech them to grant my prayer, and I shall implore the whole congregation for the same; and if they refuse to hear my prayer, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I shall retire from the congregation and renounce its ways of thinking, I shall form a sect that not only places Mozart highest but simply refuses to accept anyone besides Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me because his music did not inspire me to great deeds but made a fool of me – I, who through him lost the last grain of reason I possessed, and now spend most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a ghost what I cannot enter into. Immortal Mozart! You, to whom I owe everything, to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that overwhelmed my soul, the fear that gripped my inmost being; you, who are the reason I did not go through life without there being something that could make me tremble; you, whom I thank for the fact that I shall not have died without having loved, even though my love was unhappy. What wonder then that I should be more jealous of his glorification than of the happiest moment of my own life, more jealous of his immortality than of my own existence. Yes, to take him away, to efface his name, would be to overturn the only pillar that hitherto has prevented everything collapsing for me into a boundless chaos, into a fearful nothingness.
Though I have no fear that any age will deny him a place in that kingdom of the gods, I must be prepared for people to think it childish of me to insist that he have the first place. And though I by no means intend to be ashamed of my childishness, although for me that will always be more meaningful and have more worth than any exhaustive meditation precisely because it can be exhausted, I shall nevertheless attempt a considered proof of his legal title.
The happy feature of the classic work, what constitutes its classic nature and immortality, is the way in which the two forces absolutely cohere. This cohesion is so absolute that a later reflective age can hardly separate, even in thought, what is so intimately united without risk of giving rise to or entertaining a misunderstanding. Thus, its being said that it is Homer’s good fortune to have acquired the most remarkable epic theme can make us forget that it is always in Homer’s grasp of it that this topic comes down to us, and that its seeming to be the most perfect epic subject-matter is clear to us only in and through the transubstantiation that is due to Homer. If, on the other hand, one puts the emphasis on the poetic activity with which Homer penetrated the material, one is in danger of forgetting that the poem would never have become what it is unless the thought with which Homer penetrated it was its own thought, unless the form was that of the matter itself. The poet wants his material; but wanting is no art, as one says, quite rightly and with much truth in the case of a host of impotent poetic wants. To want rightly, on the other hand, is a great art, or rather, it is a gift. It is what is inexplicable and mysterious about genius, just like the divining rod, to which it never occurs to want except in the presence of what it wants. Here, then, wanting is far more profoundly significant than usual; yes, to the abstract understanding it may seem ridiculous, since the latter really thinks of wanting in respect of what is not, not in respect of what is.
There was a school of aesthetics which by one-sidedly stressing the importance of form can be accused of occasioning the opposite misunderstanding.2 It has often seemed strange to me that these aestheticians unquestioningly adhered to the Hegelian philosophy, seeing that even a general familiarity with Hegel, and not specifically with his aesthetics, makes it clear that above all he places great emphasis in aesthetic respects on the importance of the subject-matter. However, both go essentially together, and to show this it is enough to point to a single fact since otherwise nothing of the kind would be thinkable. It is usually only a single work, or a single set of works, that stamps the individual poet or artist, etc. as a classic. The same individual may have produced many different things which stand in no relation to this. Thus Homer has also written a Batrachomyomachia,3 but has not become a classic or immortal on that account. To say that that is due to the insignificance of the subject is foolish indeed, for it is the balance that makes a work a classic. If what made it a classic lay only in the individual artist, then everything he produced would have to be a classic, in a similar though higher sense as that in which the bee always produces a certain type of cell. Were one then to reply that the reason is that he has been luckier with the one than with the other, one would really not have replied at all. This is in part just a superior tautology, of the kind that all too often enjoy the honour of being taken for answers. In part, considered as an answer, it is the answer given inside another relativity than the one in which the question is posed. For it tells us nothing about the relation between matter and form, and could at best come into consideration when it is a question of the formative activity alone.
Now Mozart’s case is similar: there is one work alone of his which makes him a classic composer and absolutely immortal. That work is Don Giovanni. Whatever else he has produced may cause pleasure and delight, arouse our admiration, enrich the soul, satisfy the ear, gladden the heart; but it does him and his immortality no service to lump everything together and make everything equally great. Don Giovanni is his acceptance piece.4 With Don Giovanni he enters that eternity which lies not outside time but within it, which no curtain conceals from human eyes, into which the immortals are admitted not once and for all but are constantly discovered as one generation passes and turns its gaze towards them, is happy in its contemplation of them, goes to the grave, and the next generation passes in its turn and is transfigured in its contemplation. Through his Don Giovanni he enters the ranks of those immortals, of those visibly transfigured ones, whom no cloud ever carried away from the eyes of man.5 Through Don Giovanni he ranks highest among them. It was this, as was said above, that I would try to prove.
All classic works, as earlier remarked, rank equally high because each one ranks infinitely high. Nevertheless, if one tries to introduce some order into this procession, it is evident that one can base it on nothing essential; for if one could, it would follow that there was an essential difference, and from that it would follow in turn that the word ‘classic’ was incorrectly predicated of them collectively. Thus, to ground a classification on the different nature of the subject-matter would immediately involve one in a misunderstanding which in its wider implications would end in the rescinding of the whole concept of the classic. The subject-matter is an essential factor to the extent that it is one of the factors, but it is not the absolute, since it is indeed just one factor. One could point out that certain kinds of classic in a sense have no subject-matter, whereas with others the subject-matter plays such an important part. The first would be the case with the works we admire as classics in architecture, sculpture, music and painting, especially the first three, and even with painting so far as the subject-matter enters into it, for its importance is really only in providing the occasion. The second would apply to poetry, taking that word in its widest sense to designate all artistic production based on language and the historical consciousness. In itself this observation is quite correct, but if one tries to base a classification on it by seeing the absence of subject-matter or its presence as a help or a hindrance to the productive subject, one goes adrift. Strictly speaking, one would be urging the opposite of what one really intended, as always happens when one operates abstractly in dialectical categories, where it isn’t just that we say one thing and mean another but we say the other; we say not what we think we are saying but the opposite. So it is when we make the subject-matter the principle of classification. In talking about this, we talk about something quite different, namely the formative activity.6 If, on the other hand, we proceed from the formative activity and stress only that, we suffer the same fate. By trying to call on the difference, and thus stress that in some directions the formative activity is creative to the degree that it also creates the subject-matter while in others it receives it, here again, even though we think we are talking about the formative activity, we are really talking about the subject-matter and in fact using that as the basis of our classification. Exactly the same applies to the formative activity as a point of departure as to the subject-matter. It is never possible, therefore, to use just one of them as an ordering principle; it will always be too essential to provide sufficient contingency, too accidental to provide an essential ordering. But this absolute mutual penetration, which implies, if we are to speak plainly, that we can just as well say that the matter penetrates the form as that the form penetrates the matter – this mutual penetration, this ‘like for like’ in the immortal friendship of the classic, may serve to throw light on a new side of the classic and confine it so that it does not become too ample. For those aestheticians who one-sidedly pressed the case of poetic activity so broadened this concept as to enrich, indeed overburden, that pantheon with classic knick-knacks and trifles, so much so that the natural conception of a cool hall of great figures of individual distinction disappeared altogether, and the pantheon became a junk-room instead. According to this aesthetics, every pretty little piece of artistic perfection is a classic work assured of absolute immortality; in this hocus-pocus admittance indeed was given above all to small trifles of this kind. Although otherwise hating paradox, no one feared the paradox that the least was really art. The error consists in one-sidedly highlighting the formal activity. So an aesthetics of this kind could only sustain itself for a definite time, that is for as long as no one was aware that time mocked it and its classic works. This view was, in the field of aesthetics, a form of the radicalism that has manifested itself similarly in so many spheres; it was an expression of the unbridled subject in its equally unbridled emptiness. This effort, however, like so many, found its suppressor in Hegel. It is, in general, a sad fact with regard to the Hegelian philosophy that it hasn’t at all acquired the importance, either for a previous or a present age, that it would have had if the previous one had not been so busy scaring people into it, but on the contrary had given them a little more calm in which to appropriate it, and the present one had not been so tirelessly active in hustling people beyond it. Hegel brought back the subject-matter, the idea in its proper right, and thereby banished all these ephemeral classics, these insubstantial beings – dusk moths from the vaults of classicality. It is far from our intention to deny these works their due value; the point is to ensure that the language here is not confused, the concepts impoverished, as happens in so many other places. A certain eternity one may gladly accord them, and this they deserve; yet this eternity is really only the eternal instant which every true work of art possesses, not that full-bodied eternity in the midst of the vicissitudes of the times. What these products lacked was ideas, and the greater their formal perfection, the more quickly they burnt themselves out. The more their technical proficiency was developed to the highest degree of virtuosity, the more transient this virtuosity became and it had neither courage and strength nor poise to withstand the blows of time, while with an increasingly superior air making ever greater claims to be the most rarefied of spirits. Only where the idea is brought to rest transparently in a definite form can we talk of a classic work, but then it will also be able to stand up to the times. This unity, this inward mutuality, is possessed by every classic work, and thus one easily sees that any attempt at classifying the different classics based on a separation of matter and form, or of idea and form, is by virtue of that very fact a failure.
One might conceive another approach. One could make the object of consideration the medium in which the idea is manifested, and noting how one medium was richer, another poorer, base the classification on the fact that one sees help or hindrance in variations of richness or poverty of the medium. But the medium stands in far too necessary a relation to the whole work for a classification based on it not to get entangled, after a step or two, in the difficulties stressed above.
On the other hand, I believe the following observations will open the way for a classification which will have validity precisely because it is altogether contingent. The more abstract and hence impoverished the idea is, and the more abstract and hence impoverished the medium, the greater the probability that no repetition is conceivable, the greater the probability that having found its expression it has acquired it once and for all. On the other hand, the more concrete and hence richer the idea, and similarly with the medium, the greater the probability of a repetition. If I now arrange all the different classics side by side and, without putting them in any order, am amazed precisely to find that they all rank equally high, then one section may still easily prove to contain more works than another, or if not there is the possibility of its doing so, while such a possibility seems less likely in the case of the other.
This is something I wish to develop in a little more detail. The more abstract the idea, the less the probability. But how does the idea become concrete? By being permeated with the historical. The more concrete the idea the greater the probability. The more abstract the medium the less the probability, the more concrete the greater. But what does it mean to say that the medium is concrete except that it either does or is seen to approximate to language; for language is the most concrete of all media. The idea which manifests itself in sculpture is entirely abstract, it bears no relation to the historical, and the medium in which it manifests itself is similarly abstract; accordingly the probability that the section of classics embracing sculpture will contain only a few works is large. In this I have all the testimony of time and the assent of experience. If, on the other hand, I take a concrete idea and a concrete medium, it proves otherwise. Thus Homer, indeed, is a classic epic poet, but precisely because the idea which comes to light in the epic is a concrete idea, and because the medium is language, the section of classic works embracing the epic can be thought to contain several works all equally classic since history is continually giving us new epic material. In this, too, I have the testimony of history and the assent of experience.
Seeing that my classification is based on this complete contingency, its own contingency can hardly be denied. But if that was what I were to be criticized for, my reply would be that the criticism is misplaced because that is just how it should be. It is a contingent fact that the one section contains, or can contain, a greater number than the other. But because this is a contingency one could clearly just as well place that class highest which does or might have the highest number. I could stick to my previous reasoning at this point and quite evenly reply that this was perfectly correct but that one should only praise my consistency all the more for placing the opposite class highest altogether contingently. However, I shall not do that but appeal on the contrary to something which speaks in my favour, namely that the sections which embrace the concrete ideas are not complete and do not allow of such completion. For that reason it is more natural to place the others first and hold the double-doors constantly open for the latter. But if it were objected that it was an imperfection, a deficiency on the part of that first class, then the objector would be ploughing outside the furrows of my own thought and I cannot heed his speech however profound it may be; for the fixed point is indeed that, seen essentially, everything is equally perfect.
But what is the most abstract idea? Our concern here, of course, is only with an idea that can become the object of an artistic treatment, not with ideas that lend themselves to scientific presentation. Which is the most abstract medium? I shall answer the latter first. The medium farthest removed from language.
Before proceeding to the first question, however, I would call the reader’s attention to something that affects the final solution to my problem. It is not always the case that the most abstract medium has as its object the most abstract idea. Thus although the medium used by the architect is the most abstract, the ideas brought to light in architecture are not at all the most abstract. Architecture bears a much closer relation to history than does, for example, sculpture. Yet another choice now presents itself. In our order of ranking I can place in the first class those works whose medium is the most abstract or those whose idea is the most abstract. Here I select the idea, not the medium.
Of course abstract media are the prerogative of sculpture and painting and music as well as architecture. This is not the place to pursue that question. The most abstract idea conceivable is the spirit of sensuality.7 But in what medium can it be represented? Only in music. It cannot be represented in sculpture, for in itself it is a kind of quality of inwardness. It cannot be painted, for it cannot be grasped in fixed contours; it is an energy, a storm, impatience, passion, and so on, in all their lyrical quality, existing not in a single moment but in a succession of moments, for if it existed in a single moment it could be portrayed or painted. Its existing in a succession of moments indicates its epic character, yet in a stricter sense it is not an epic, for it has not reached the level of words; it moves constantly in an immediacy. Nor can it be represented, therefore, in poetry. The only medium that can represent it is music. For music has an element of time in it yet it does not lapse in time except in an unimportant sense. What it cannot express is the historical in time.
We have the perfect unity of this idea and its corresponding form in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But just because the idea is so immensely abstract, so too is the medium abstract, and therefore there is no probability of Mozart’s ever having a competitor. Mozart’s good fortune was to get hold of a subject that is in itself absolutely musical, and were any other composer to vie with Mozart, all he could do would be to compose Don Giovanni over again. Homer found a perfect epic subject, but one can imagine many epic poems because history has more epic material to offer. That is not the case with Don Giovanni. What I really mean by this can perhaps best be grasped by pointing to the difference with a related idea. Goethe’s Faust is a genuine classic, the idea is an historical one, and so every significant historical age will have its Faust. Faust has language as its medium, and the fact that language is a far more concrete medium is another reason why several works of the same kind can be imagined. Don Giovanni, on the other hand, is and will remain the only one of its kind, just as the classic sculptures of Greece. But since the idea in Don Giovanni is far more abstract even than that underlying sculpture, one sees easily why we have just one work in music but several in sculpture. One can indeed imagine many more musical classics, yet there still remains just one work of which it can be said that its idea is absolutely musical, so that the music does not enter as an accompaniment but, in bringing the idea to light, reveals its own innermost being. Therefore Mozart with his Don Giovanni stands highest among the immortals.
But now I shall abandon this whole inquiry. It is written only for those in love. And just as it takes little to please a child, everyone knows how the most curious things can bring pleasure to people in love. It is like a heated lovers’ quarrel over nothing, which nevertheless has its worth – for the lovers. Although the above remarks have tried in every possible way, conceivable and inconceivable, to secure acknowledgement of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as first among all classics, virtually no attempt has been made to prove that it is indeed a classic. […] I admit that to do that would be a very appropriate introduction to the real inquiry […] but it could never occur to me to undertake that task, however easily it might come to me. But since I shall all the time be assuming the matter to be beyond question, the sequel will offer many opportunities for, and ways of, shedding light on Don Giovanni in this respect, just as what has gone before held several hints.
The task this inquiry has really set itself is to show the significance of the musical erotic, and to that end to indicate in turn the different stages which, all sharing the property of being immediately erotic, agree also in all being essentially musical. What I have to say on this score I owe to Mozart alone. So should anyone be civil enough to concede that I am right in what I say, but have some doubts as to how far what I say relates to Mozart’s music or to what I read into it, I can assure him that he will find in the music not only the little that I contrive to present here but infinitely more; indeed, I can assure him that this is precisely the thought that makes me so bold as to hazard an explanation of particular features of Mozart’s music. What someone has loved with the infatuation and admired with the enthusiasm of youth, what someone has kept up a clandestine and enigmatic commerce with in his innermost soul, what someone has hidden away in his heart, that is something the like of which one always approaches with a certain shyness, with mixed feelings, when one knows that the intention is to try to understand it. What you have learned to know bit by bit, like a bird gathering every little straw, happier over each small piece than over all the rest of the world; what the loving ear has absorbed, solitary in the great multitude, unremarked in its secret place of hiding; what the greedy ear has snatched up, never gratified, the miserly ear hidden, never secure, that whose softest echo has never deceived the searching ear’s sleepless vigil; what you have lived by day, relived by night, what has banished sleep and made it troubled; what you have dreamt of in sleep, what you have woken up to dream of again when awake, what caused you to leap up in the middle of the night for fear of forgetting it; what has come to you in your moments of greatest rapture; what like a woman’s embroidery you keep constantly beside you; what has followed you on the clear moonlit nights, in lonely forests by the shores, in the gloomy streets, in the dead of night, at break of day, what has ridden with you on horseback, accompanied you in the carriage, what permeates your home, what your chamber has been witness to, what has echoed in your ear, resounded through your soul, what your soul has spun into its finest web – that now reveals itself to thought. As those mysterious beings in ancient tales rise from the ocean bed invested in seaweed, so it now rises up from the sea of remembrance interwoven with memories. The soul becomes sad and the heart soft, for it is as though one bade it farewell, were parting from it never to meet again, either in time or eternity. One feels as though unfaithful, that one has broken one’s covenant, one feels one is no longer the same, not as young, not as childlike; one fears for oneself in case one loses what has made one glad and happy and rich; one fears for what one loves lest it suffer with this change, perhaps prove less perfect, that possibly it will be at a loss for answers to the many questions; and then, alas! all is lost, the spell is gone, and never more can it be evoked. As regards Mozart’s music, my soul knows no fear, my confidence no bounds. In part this is because what I have understood so far is so very little and there will always be enough left over hiding in the shadows of presentiment; partly because I am convinced that if Mozart ever became wholly comprehensible to me, he would for the first time become wholly incomprehensible to me.
To maintain that Christianity has brought sensuality into the world seems boldly venturesome. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying is, and that goes here too, as will be apparent when one considers that in positing something one indirectly posits the other thing which one excludes. Since sensuality in general is what is negated, it first comes into view, is first posited, through the act that excludes it by positing the opposite, positive principle. As a principle, a power, a system in itself, sensuality was first posited with Christianity, and to that extent Christianity has introduced sensuality to the world. However, if one wishes properly to understand the proposition that Christianity has introduced sensuality to the world, it must be understood identically with its opposite, that it is Christianity that has chased sensuality out, kept it out of the world. As a principle, a power, a system in itself, sensuality was first posited with Christianity. I could add a further qualification which perhaps makes my meaning most clear: it was Christianity that first posited sensuality under the category of spirit. That is quite natural, for Christianity is spirit, and spirit the positive principle it has introduced to the world. But when sensuality is considered under the category of spirit, one sees that its significance is that it is to be excluded; but it is precisely by the fact that it is to be excluded that it is defined as a principle, as a power; for what spirit, itself a principle, is to exclude must be something appearing in the form of a principle even though it only appears as a principle the moment it is excluded. That sensuality has existed before Christianity would naturally be a very foolish objection, for it is self-evident that what is to be excluded always pre-exists what excludes it, even if in another sense it first comes into existence through its exclusion. This is due, again, to its coming into existence in another sense, and that is why I said at the start: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Sensuality has indeed existed previously, but not defined spiritually. In what manner then has it existed? It has existed under the category of soul. That is how it existed in paganism and if one is looking for the most perfect expression of it, that is how it existed in Greece. But under the category of soul, sensuality is not opposition, exclusion, but harmony and accord. Precisely because sensuality is posited under the category of harmony, however, it is not posited as a principle but as an assonant enclitic.8
The importance of this consideration is to cast light on the different forms assumed by the erotic in the different steps in the development of the world-consciousness, and so to lead us towards a definition of the immediate erotic as identical with the musical erotic. In the Greek consciousness, sensuality was under control in the beautiful individual, or more properly, it was not under control for it was not indeed an enemy that had to be subdued, a dangerous rebel to be kept in check; it was given freedom of life and joy in the beautiful individual. Sensuality, consequently, was not posited as a principle; the quality of soul that constituted the beautiful individual was inconceivable without the sensual; for that reason neither was sensually based eroticism posited as a principle. Sensual love was everywhere as an element, and present elementally in the beautiful individual. The gods knew its power no less than men; the gods no less than men knew their happy and unhappy love affairs. In none of them, however, is love present as a principle; in so far as it existed in them, in the individual, it was present as an element of love’s universal power, which however was present nowhere, and therefore not even for the Greek conception or in the Greek consciousness. It might be objected that Eros was, after all, the god of love; so it must be possible to imagine love present as a principle at least in him. But apart from the fact that here again love does not depend on the erotic, in the sense of deriving from the sensual alone, but on qualities of the soul, there is another factor to note which I shall now go into more closely.
Eros was the god of love but was not in love himself. In so far as the other gods and men sensed the power of love in themselves, they attributed this to Eros, referred it to him, but Eros was not himself in love; and the fact that it did happen to him once9 must be considered an exception; in spite of being the god of love, he lagged far behind the other gods in the number of his adventures, and far behind men. Indeed, that he did fall in love amounts to saying that he too yielded to the universal power of love, which became in a way a power outside him, and which, being turned away from him, had no place of its own where one could seek it. And his love is not based on sensuality but on qualities of soul. It is a genuinely Greek thought that the god of love is not himself in love while all others owe it to him that they are. Were I to imagine a god or a goddess of longing, it would be genuinely Greek to suppose that while all who felt the sweet unrest or pain of longing referred it to this being, this being itself had no feeling of longing. I know no better way of describing the remarkable nature of this relation than by saying that it is the converse of representation. In the relation of representation all the energy is gathered in a single individual and the particular individuals share in him to the extent that they share in his particular movements. I might also say, this relation is the converse of that upon which the Incarnation is based. In the Incarnation the individual has the whole of life’s fullness within him and the other individuals only have access to this from beholding it in the incarnated individual. In the Greek relationship, the opposite is the case. What makes for the power of the god is not in the god but in all the other individuals who refer it to him; it is as though he himself were powerless, impotent, because he communicates his energy to all the rest of the world. The incarnated individual as it were sucks in the energy from all the others and the fullness is then in him and only for the others to the extent that they behold it in that individual. This will have consequences for what follows, just as it is important in itself with regard to the categories which the world-consciousness uses in different epochs. Sensuality as a principle is not to be found in the Greek consciousness, nor do we find the erotic as a principle based on the principle of the sensual; and even if we had found that, we still see – and this is of the greatest importance for this inquiry – that the Greek consciousness lacks the strength to concentrate the whole in a single individual but lets the whole radiate to all the others from a point which lacks it, so that really this constitutive point is to be identified by its being the only point which lacks what it gives to all others.
Sensuality as a principle, then, is posited with Christianity, and similarly the sensual erotic as a principle. The idea of representation was introduced to the world by Christianity. If I imagine the sensual erotic as a principle, as a power, as a realm characterized by spirit, that is to say characterized by being excluded by spirit, if I imagine it concentrated in a single individual, then I have the concept of the spirit of the sensual erotic. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first introduced to the world, if only in an indirect sense.
If this spirit of the sensual erotic in all its immediacy demands expression, the question is: what medium lends itself to that? What must be especially borne in mind here is that it demands expression and representation in its immediacy. In its mediate state and its reflection in something else it comes under language and becomes subject to ethical categories. In its immediacy it can only be expressed in music. On this score I must ask the reader to recall what was said about this in the platitudinous introduction. This is where the significance of music is revealed in its full validity, and in a stricter sense it also reveals itself as a Christian art, or rather as the art which Christianity posits by shutting it out, as the medium for what Christianity shuts out and thereby posits. In other words, music is the demonic.10 In the erotic sensual genius, music has its absolute object. This of course by no means implies that music cannot express other things, but this is nevertheless its proper object. Similarly, the art of sculpture can represent much more than human beauty, and yet this is its absolute object; painting can represent much more than celestially transfigured beauty, and still this is its absolute object. The important thing in this respect is to be able to see the concept in each art, and not let oneself be put off by what it can do besides. Man’s concept is spirit and we must not allow ourselves to be put off by the fact that he is also able to walk on two legs. Language’s concept is thought, and we must not let ourselves be put off by the view of certain sensitive people that its greatest significance is to produce inarticulate sounds.
Here I beg to be allowed a little platitudinous interlude; praeterea censeo,11 that Mozart is the greatest among classical composers, and that his Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.
Now regarding the nature of music as a medium, this will naturally always be a very interesting problem. Whether I am able to say anything adequate on the matter is another question. I am well aware that I have no understanding of music. I freely admit that I am a layman. I do not hide the fact that I am not one of those select people who possess musical expertise, that I am at most a proselyte of the gate,12 whom a strangely irresistible impulse carried from afar to this point but no further. And yet it could be that the little I have to say contained some particular remark which, if it met with favour and indulgence, might be found to contain some truth even if it concealed itself under a shabby coat. I stand outside music and from this standpoint I observe it. That this standpoint is very imperfect I freely admit; that I am able to see very little in comparison with those fortunate people who stand inside I do not deny; but I still continue to hope that from my standpoint I too may be able to impart some odd piece of enlightenment on the subject, although the initiated could do it much better – yes, to some extent even understand what I say better than I do myself. If I were to imagine two countries bordering on each other, with one of which I was fairly familiar and with the other was quite unfamiliar, and I was not allowed to enter that unknown realm however much I wanted to, I should still be able to form some conception of it. I would travel to the boundaries of the kingdom I knew and follow them constantly, and as I did so my movements would describe the contours of that unknown land; in this way I would form a general idea of it even though I had never set foot in it. And if this was a task that greatly occupied me, and if I was indefatigable in my accuracy, it would no doubt sometimes happen that, as I stood sadly at my own country’s boundary and looked longingly into that unknown land which was so near me and yet so far, some little revelation might fall to my lot. And although I feel that music is an art which requires experience to a high degree to justify one’s having an opinion about it, still I comfort myself again, as so often, with the paradox that there is experience to be gained in presentiment and in ignorance. I comfort myself by remembering that Diana, who had not herself given birth, nevertheless came to the assistance of the childbearing woman; indeed that she had this as a native gift from childhood so that she came to Latona’s assistance in her labour when she herself was born.
The country known to me, to whose furthest boundaries I intend to go in order to discover music, is language. If one wants to arrange the different media according to a definite order of development, one must place music and language next to each other; for which reason it has also been said that music is a language, which is more than just a brilliant remark. If one liked indulging in brilliance one could say that sculpture and painting, too, are a kind of language, in so far as every way of expressing an idea is always a language, since language is the essence of the idea. Brilliant people talk, therefore, of the language of nature, and maudlin clergymen now and then open up the book of nature for us to read something which neither they nor their hearers understand. If the remark that music is a language was in no better shape than this, I should not question it but let it pass and count for what it is. But that is not how it is. It is only when spirit is posited that language comes into its rights; but when spirit is posited, everything that is not spirit is excluded. But this exclusion is a qualification of spirit, and to the degree, then, that what is excluded is to assert itself it needs a spiritually qualified medium, and this is music. But a medium which is spiritually determined is essentially language; then since music is spiritually determined, it has justly been called a language.
As a medium, language is the one absolutely spiritually qualified medium; it is therefore the proper medium for the idea. To elaborate this point in more detail goes beyond both my competence and the scope of this little inquiry. Just one remark, however, which again brings me back to music. In language the sensual is, as medium, reduced to the level of mere instrument and constantly negated. Such is not the case with the other media. Neither in sculpture nor in painting is the sensual a mere instrument but an integral part, nor is it constantly negated, for it must continually be part of what is seen. It would be a peculiarly perverted way of looking at a statue or a painting to ignore the sensual aspect, thus completely rescinding its beauty. In sculpture, architecture, painting, the idea is bound up with the medium; but this fact that the idea neither reduces the medium to the level of mere instrument, nor constantly negates it, is as it were an expression of the fact that that medium cannot speak. So too with nature. Therefore we rightly say that nature is dumb, and architecture and sculpture and painting; we say it rightly in spite of all those fine-tuned, sensitive ears that can hear them speak. It is therefore idiocy to say that nature is a language, as it is inept to say that the mute is vocal, since it is not even a language in the sense in which sign-language is. But with language it is different. The sensual is reduced to mere instrument and thus rescinded. If when a man spoke one heard the movements of his tongue, etc., he would speak badly; if when he heard, he heard the air vibrations instead of the words, he would hear badly; if when reading a book one constantly saw the individual letters, one would read badly. Language becomes the perfect medium just at the moment when everything sensual is negated in it. So also with music; what should really be heard constantly emancipates itself from the sensual. That music, as a medium, does not stand as high as language has already been pointed out, and that is also why I said that only in a certain sense was music a language.
Language makes its appeal to the ear. No other medium does that. The ear is the most spiritually determined of the senses. This I believe most people will admit. Should anyone wish further information on this point, I refer him to the preface of Karikaturen des Heiligsten by Steffens.13 Beside language, music is the only medium that addresses the ear. In this we have yet another analogy and testimony to the way in which music is a language. There is much in nature which addresses itself to the ear but what affects the ear is the purely sensual, and therefore nature is dumb. And it is a ridiculous fancy that one hears something because one hears a cow moo or, what has perhaps a larger claim in this respect, a nightingale sing; it is mere imagination to think that one hears something, mere imagination that the one is worth more than the other, for it’s all six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element. Only music also takes place in time, but the fact that it takes place in time is again a negation of the sensual. With products of the other arts, their sensual character indicates precisely that they have their existence in space. Now, of course, again there is much in nature that takes place in time. Thus when a brook murmurs and continues to murmur it seems to have the character of time. However, that is not so, and were one to insist that there was this character of time, one would have to say that although it was there, it was present in a spatialized way. Music exists only in the moment of its performance, for however skilful one may be at reading notes and however lively one’s imagination, it cannot be denied that it is only in an unreal sense that the music exists when read. It exists really only when it is performed. This might seem to be an imperfection in this art as compared with the others, whose works constantly endure because they have their existence in the sensual. Yet that is not so. Rather it is a proof that music is a higher, a more spiritual art.
If I begin with language, in order, by moving through it, to as it were hear my way towards music, the matter appears to be roughly as follows. If I assume that prose is the language-form farthest removed from music, then I detect already in the oratorical style of delivery, in the sonorous structure of periods, a suggestion of the musical which comes more and more strongly to the fore through different levels in the poetic style, in the structure of the verse, in the rhyme, until at last the musical has developed so strongly that language ceases and everything becomes music. This latter is indeed a favourite expression of the poets, who use it to indicate that in a way they disown the idea, the idea drops out of their view, everything ends in music. This might seem to indicate that music is an even more perfect medium than language. However, that is one of those mawkish misunderstandings which originate only in empty heads. That it is a misunderstanding will be shown later; here I would only draw attention to the remarkable circumstance that by moving through language in the opposite direction I again come up against music; that is, when I proceed downward from concept-permeated prose until I land in interjections which again are musical, just as the child’s first babbling is musical. Here, however, it could hardly be said that music is a more perfect medium than language, or that music is a richer medium than language, unless one takes saying ‘ugh!’ to be worth more than a whole thought. But what follows from this – that wherever language comes to an end, I run into the musical? Surely, it is the most perfect expression of the idea that music always sets limits to language. One sees in addition how this is connected with the misunderstanding that music is a richer medium than language. In saying that when language stops, music begins, and in saying, as people do, that everything is musical, we are not going onwards but back. That is why I have never had any sympathy – and here perhaps even the experts will agree with me – for that purified music which thinks it can do without words. For as a rule it thinks of itself as being above the word, in spite of being its inferior. Now one might object as follows: ‘If it is true that language is a richer medium than music, it is incomprehensible why it should be so hard to give an aesthetic account of the musical, incomprehensible that language should always prove in this connection a poorer medium than music.’ However, it is neither incomprehensible nor beyond explanation. For music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. That is also why in relation to language music comes first and last; but from this one also sees it is a misunderstanding to say that music is a more perfect medium. In language there is reflection and therefore language cannot express the immediate. Reflection kills the immediate and that is why it is impossible to express the musical in language; but this apparent poverty of language is precisely its wealth. For the immediate is the indeterminable and so language cannot apprehend it, but the fact that it is indeterminable is not its perfection but a defect. This is indirectly acknowledged in many ways. Thus to cite but one example, we say: ‘I can’t really explain why I do this or that, in this way or that; I do it by ear.’ In connection with things bearing no relation to music we frequently use a word taken from music, but what we indicate by its use is the obscure, the unaccountable, the immediate.
Now if the immediate, qualified spiritually, is what is properly expressed in music, one may ask again, more explicitly, what species of the immediate is essentially music’s object. The immediate, qualified spiritually, can be specified as falling either within the sphere of the spiritual or outside it. When the immediate, qualified spiritually, is specified as falling within the sphere of the spiritual, it can well find its expression in the musical, but this immediacy cannot be music’s absolute object, for so specifying it as to include it within the spiritual suggests that music is in a sphere foreign to it; it forms a constantly cancelled prelude. But if the immediate, qualified spiritually, is so specified as to fall outside the spiritual, we have then music’s absolute object. For the former species of the immediate it is not essential that it be expressed in music but essential for it to become spirit, and accordingly to be expressed in language. For the latter it is, on the contrary, essential that it be expressed in music, it cannot be expressed other than in music, it cannot be expressed in language, since spiritually it is so specified as to fall outside the spiritual and accordingly outside language. But the immediacy thus excluded by the spirit is sensual immediacy. This belongs to Christianity. In music it has its absolute medium, and from this can also be explained the fact that music was not properly developed in antiquity but belongs to the Christian era. Music is, then, the medium for that species of the immediate which, qualified spiritually, is specified as lying outside spirit. Naturally, music can express much else, but this is its absolute object. It is also easy to see that music is a more sensual medium than language, much more stress being placed here on the sensual sound than in language.
Sensual genius is thus music’s absolute object. Sensual genius is absolutely lyrical, and in music it breaks out in all its lyrical impatience, for it is qualified spiritually and is therefore power, life, movement, constant unrest, continual succession. But this unrest, this succession, does not enrich it; its spirit remains always the same, it does not develop but rages on uninterrupted as if in a single breath. Were I to characterize this lyrical quality with a single predicate, I might say: ‘It sounds.’ And that takes me back once more to the spirit of sensuality as what manifests itself immediately in music.
I realize that even I could say considerably more on this point. I acknowledge that it would be an easy matter for the experts to make a much better job of clarifying it. But since no one, as far as I know, has made the attempt or even a show of doing so, since they all continue to repeat that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the crown of all operas but without elaborating on what they mean by that, although they all say it in a way that clearly shows they mean to say more than just that Don Giovanni is the best opera, that there is a qualitative difference between it and all other operas which is nevertheless not to be found in the absolute relation between idea, form, subject-matter and medium; since, I say, that is so, then I have broken the silence. Maybe I have been a little too hasty, maybe I would have succeeded in saying it better had I waited yet a while; I do not know. But what I do know is that I have not hurried in order to have the pleasure of speaking, not hurried because I was afraid in case someone more expert might steal a march on me, but because I feared that if I too kept silent, the stones would take to speaking in Mozart’s honour, to the shame of every human being to whom it was given to speak.
What has been said so far I assume is just about enough for this little inquiry, since its main purpose here is to serve to clear the way for the characterization of the immediate erotic stages as we get to know them in Mozart. Before going on to that, however, I would cite a further fact which lets us see the absolute relation between the spirit of sensuality and the musical from another angle. Music, as we know, has always been subject to suspicion on the part of religious zealots. Whether they are right or not does not concern us here since that has only a religious interest. On the other hand, it is not unimportant to consider what has brought this about. If I follow the course of religious zealotry in this regard, I can characterize it quite generally in the following way: the stronger the religiosity, the more one renounces music and stresses the word. The different stages in this respect are represented in world history. The final stage excludes music entirely and abides by the word alone. I could deck out this statement with a multitude of particular observations. I will not do that but simply cite a few words from a Presbyterian in one of Achim von Arnim’s stories: ‘We Presbyterians regard the organ as the devil’s bagpipes which lull serious reflection to sleep, just as dance benumbs good intentions.’14 This must be considered an exemplary remark. But what reason can one have for excluding music and giving absolute sway to the word? All intelligent sects will admit that, when misused, the word can confuse the emotions just as much as music. So there must be some difference in kind. But what religious zeal wants to give expression to is spirit; so it requires language, which is spirit’s proper medium, and rejects music, which, for it, is a sensual medium and so far always an imperfect medium for the expression of spirit. Whether religious zeal is right in excluding music is, as I said, another question; its view of the relation of music to language, on the other hand, may be perfectly correct. Music, therefore, need not be excluded, but we have to realize that in the spiritual realm it is an imperfect medium, and that therefore, specified as spirit, music cannot have its absolute object in the immediately spiritual. From this it by no means follows that one must look upon it as the work of the devil, even if our age provides much fearful evidence of the demonic power with which music can seize hold of an individual, and of how this individual can in turn arouse and captivate the masses, particularly women, in the seductive snares of dread with all the titillation of voluptuous delight. It by no means follows from this that one must regard it as the work of the devil, even if one notes with a secret horror how terribly this art, above all others, often lacerates its votaries, a phenomenon which oddly enough seems to have escaped the attention of psychologists and the multitude, except when they are startled now and then by a despairing individual’s shriek of terror. However, one cannot fail to notice that in the folk legends, and thus in the popular consciousness these express, the musical is again the demonic. As an example I can mention the Irish March of the Elves.15
As for the immediate erotic stages, I owe anything at all I have to say on this subject to Mozart alone, to whom I owe everything. Since, however, the comparisons I shall try to make here are based on combinations other than his and so can only indirectly be ascribed to him, before going to work I have put myself and the comparisons to the test to find out if I might in any way disturb the pleasure I and my reader derive from admiring Mozart’s immortal works. Anyone who wants to see Mozart in his true immortal greatness must turn his gaze upon Don Giovanni. Compared with that everything else is accidental, unessential. But then if we look at Don Giovanni in such a way as to see particular things from Mozart’s other operas from the same point of view, I am convinced that we shall neither belittle him nor do any harm to ourselves or our neighbour. We shall then have the chance to rejoice in the fact that music’s real potential is exhausted in the music of Mozart.
I should add that in using the word ‘stages’ in the above, and in continuing to use it in what follows, the idea must not be taken in such a literal way as to imply that each stage exists independently, the one outside the other. I might perhaps more pertinently use the word ‘metamorphoses’. The different stages taken together constitute the immediate stage, and this shows that the individual stages are more like disclosures of predicates, so that all the predicates tumble down into the wealth of the last stage, since this is the real stage. The other stages have no independent existence; in themselves they exist only in concept, and from this one may see their contingent character as against the last stage. Since, however, they have found separate expression in Mozart’s music, I shall discuss them separately. Above all, however, one must avoid thinking of them as different levels of consciousness, since even the last stage has not yet arrived at consciousness. I am all the time concerned only with the immediate in its sheer immediacy.
Of course, the difficulties always encountered when one considers music aesthetically are not to be avoided here either. The difficulty in the foregoing lay chiefly in the fact that while I wanted to prove through a process of thought that sensual genius is the proper object of music, really this can only be proved with music, just as it is only through music itself that I myself have come to an appreciation of music. The difficulty the following must contend with is really that since what the music under discussion expresses is essentially music’s proper object, this music expresses it far more perfectly than does language, which makes a very poor showing in comparison. Of course, if I had been concerned with different levels of consciousness, the advantage would be on my side and that of language, but that is not the case here. So what remains to be explained can only have meaning for the person who has listened and who continues constantly to listen. For him it may perhaps contain a suggestion or two that may move him to listen once more.
First Stage
The first stage is suggested by the Page in Figaro. Of course we should not see in the Page a particular individual, as we are so easily tempted to when in imagination or reality we see him represented by a person. For then it would be difficult to avoid – as is also partly true of the Page in the play – the intrusion of something accidental, something not relevant to the idea, his becoming more than he should be; for in a sense that is what he does as soon as he becomes an individual. But in becoming more he becomes less, he ceases to be the idea. For that reason no spoken lines can be given to him, music is the only adequate expression, and one notes accordingly that Figaro as well as Don Giovanni, as they have come from Mozart’s hand, belong to opera seria.16 But if we look on the Page as a mythical figure we shall find what is characteristic of the first stage expressed in the music.
The sensual awakens, though not to movement but to motionless rest, not to joy and gladness but to deep melancholy. Desire is not yet awake, it is moodily hinted at. In desire there is always the desired, which rises out of it and comes to view in a bewildering twilight. So it is for the sensual: shadows and mists take the object away, yet its reflections in these bring it nearer. Desire possesses what will become its object but does so without having desired it, and in that way does not possess it. That is the painful, but in its sweetness, also captivating and fascinating contradiction which resounds with its sadness, its melancholy, through this stage. For the pain of it lies not in there being too little but too much. The desire is a quiet desire, the longing a quiet longing, the infatuation a quiet infatuation, in which the object dawns and is so close to it as to be in it. Desire’s object hovers over the desire, sinks down into it, yet without this movement occurring through desire’s own power of attraction, or because it is desired. The object of desire does not fade away; it does not extricate itself from desire’s embrace, for that would mean that desire was awake; it is desired without being present to desire, which therefore becomes melancholy precisely because it cannot reach the point of desiring. As soon as desire awakens, or rather in and with its awakening, desire and its object are separated; now desire breathes freely and soundly where previously it could not live and breathe for the desired. When desire is not awake, the object of desire enchants and entices, yes, almost frightens it. Desire must have air, it must break out. That happens with their separation; the object of desire flees blushingly, bashful as a woman, a separation occurs between them, the desired object disappears et apparet sublimis,17 or in any case outside the desire. If one paints the ceiling of a room so that it is entirely covered with figures, such a ceiling presses down on us, as the painter says. If, lightly and quickly, one puts just a single figure on it, this ceiling seems higher. Such is the relation between desire and the desired at a first and at a later stage.
Accordingly the desire, which at this stage is only there in a presentiment of itself, is motionless, without disturbance, rocked gently only by an inexplicable inner motion. As the life of the plant is confined to the earth, so is desire lost in the present in a quiet longing, engrossed in contemplation, and yet it cannot evacuate its object, essentially because in a deeper sense no object exists; nor, however, is its object this lack of an object, for then it would straightaway be in motion; it would be specified if in no other way then in sorrow and pain, but sorrow and pain do not have in them that contradiction which is characteristic of melancholy and depression, do not have that ambiguity which is the sweetness of melancholy. Although desire is at this stage not specified as such, although this presentiment of desire, as far as its object goes, is entirely undetermined, still it has one specification, that is, it is infinitely deep. Like Thor, it sucks through a horn whose other end is the ocean,18 yet the reason why it cannot suck its object up into itself is not that the latter is infinite, but that this infinitude cannot be an object for it. Its sucking therefore does not indicate a relation to the object but is identical with its sigh, and this is infinitely deep.
In harmony with the description given here of the first stage, we will find it very significant that, musically, the part of the Page is pitched to suit a woman’s voice. What is contradictory with the stage is as though intimated by this contradiction; the desire is so indeterminate, the object so little separated, that the desired rests androgynously in the desire, just as in plant-life the male and female occupy one blossom. Desire and the object desired are joined in this unity; they are both neuter in gender.
Although the line does not belong to the mythical Page but to the Page in the piece, the poetic figure Cherubino, and although for this reason we cannot consider it in this connection, since for one thing it is not Mozart’s and for another it expresses something quite different from what we are talking about here, I would nevertheless highlight one particular line because it allows me to describe this stage in analogy to a later one. Susanna mocks Cherubino because he is also in love, in a way, with Marcellina, and the only answer the Page has to offer is, ‘She is a woman’. Regarding the Page in the play, it is essential that he should fall in love with the Countess, unessential that he should fall in love with Marcellina, that being only an indirect and paradoxical expression for the intensity of the passion binding him to the Countess. Regarding the mythical Page, it is equally essential that he should be in love with Marcellina as with the Countess; his object is womanliness, and the Countess and Marcellina have this in common. So when we later hear of Don Giovanni:
Even coquettes three-score years old
With joy he adds them to the roll,19
we have the perfect analogy to this, except that the intensity and definiteness of the desire are far more developed.
If I were to try to specify in a single predicate the special quality of Mozart’s music with regard to the Page in Figaro, I would say ‘drunk with love’. But like all intoxication, being drunk with love can work in two ways, either making the joy of life increasingly transparent or compressing it into an opaque dejection. The latter is the case with the music here, and rightly so. Music cannot give the reason, that is beyond its power. Words are unable to express the mood itself, it is too heavy, too ponderous, for words to carry; only music can express it. The reason for its melancholy lies in the profound inner contradiction that we have tried to call attention to in the foregoing.
We now leave the first stage, represented by the mythical Page; we let him go on dejectedly dreaming of what he has, continue in his melancholy yearning for what he possesses. He never gets any further, he never gets going, for his movements are illusory and hence he makes none. It is another matter with the Page in the play. We would like to have a truly and genuinely friendly interest in his future; we congratulate him on having become a captain, we let him kiss Susanna once more in farewell, we shall not let on about the mark on his forehead, which none can see who aren’t in the know,20 but no more than this, my good Cherubino, or we shall call the Count, and he will shout, ‘Be off with you, out with you, to your regiment! He’s no child, as no one knows better than myself!’
Second Stage
This stage is represented by Papageno in The Magic Flute. Here, too, of course we must separate the essential from the accidental, evoke the mythical Papageno and forget the actual person in the play, particularly because this figure has become involved in all sorts of dubious gibberish. In this respect it might be not without interest to go through the whole opera in order to show that, as far as opera is concerned, its subject-matter is deeply flawed. One would then also gain an opportunity to illuminate the erotic from a new angle, through noticing how the attempt to invest it with a deeper ethical view, which allows it to try its hand at all sorts of weighty dialectical ordeals, is a venture that has gone quite beyond the boundaries of music, so that even for a Mozart it has been impossible to lend it any deeper interest. This opera’s definitive direction is to be found in that which is not musical about it, and so, in spite of some individually perfect concert numbers and affecting utterances, it is by no means a classic opera. But none of this can occupy us in the present little inquiry. We are concerned only with Papageno; which, however, is a great advantage if for no other reason than that it excuses us from every attempt to explain the meaning of Papageno’s relationship to Tamino, a relationship which the plot makes out to be so profound and thoughtful that it becomes well-nigh unthinkable for sheer thoughtfulness.
This treatment of The Magic Flute may seem arbitrary to some readers, because it sees both too much in Papageno and too little in the rest of the opera; they may not approve of our procedure. The reason is their disagreement with us on the point of departure for any consideration of Mozart’s music. That, in our view, is of course Don Giovanni, and it is also our conviction that it is by seeing several things from the other operas in relation to it that one shows most piety towards Mozart, although I would not thereby deny the importance of making each individual opera an object of special consideration.
Desire awakens, and as one always first realizes one has been dreaming at the moment of waking, so here too the dream is over. This arousal in which desire awakens, this tremor, separates desire and its object, gives the desire an object. This is a dialectical feature which must be kept sharply in mind; only when the object exists does the desire exist; desire and its object are twins neither of which enters the world a fraction of an instant before the other. Yet though they enter it at exactly the same moment, and not even with the time interval that can separate other twins, the importance of their coming into existence in this way is not that they are united but, on the contrary, that they are separated. But this, the sensual movement, this earthquake, for a moment splits the desire and its object infinitely asunder; but as the principle of motion appears for a moment to separate, so it reveals itself again as wishing to unite the separated elements. The consequence of the separation is that desire is plucked out of its substantial repose within itself, and the object as a result no longer comes under the category of substance, but splits up into a multiplicity.
As the life of the plant is bound to earth, so is the first stage confined in substantial longing. Desire awakens. The object takes flight, revealing its multiplicity, the longing breaks loose from the soil and goes out a-wandering; the flower gets wings and flutters erratically and tirelessly hither and thither. Desire is directed towards the object, at the same time stirring within itself, the heart beats soundly and happily, the objects swiftly vanish and appear, yet before every disappearance is a present enjoyment, a moment of contact, short but blessed, incandescent like a glow-worm, fickle and fleeting like the touch of a butterfly, and as harmless; countless kisses, but so swiftly savoured that it is as if only all that was taken from one object was what was given to the next. Only momentarily is a deeper desire hinted at, but this hint is forgotten. In Papageno desire aims at discoveries. This delight in discovery is what pulsates in it, is its animation. It does not find the real object of this search, but it discovers the multiplicity through searching within it for the object it seeks to discover. Desire is thus awake but not yet specified as desire. If we remember that desire is present in all three stages, we can say that in the first stage it is specified as dreaming, in the second as seeking, in the third as desiring. The seeking desire is not yet desiring; what it seeks is only what it can desire but it does not desire it. So perhaps the most apposite description is, ‘It discovers’. If we compare Papageno with Don Giovanni in this respect, the latter’s journey through the world is something more than a voyage of discovery; he savours not just the adventure of travelling to discover, he is a knight who goes out to conquer (veni, vidi, vici).21 Discovery and conquest are here identical; indeed in a sense one can say that he forgets the discovery in the conquest, or that the discovery lies behind him, and he therefore leaves it to his servant and secretary Leporello, who keeps a list in a quite different sense from that in which I might imagine Papageno keeping accounts. Papageno picks out, Don Giovanni enjoys, Leporello checks.
I can indeed represent in thought the special character of this, as of every stage, but only in the instant it has ceased to exist. But even if I could describe its peculiarity perfectly and explain the reason for it, there would still always be something left over which I cannot say and yet wants to be heard. It is too immediate to be grasped in words. So, too, with Papageno, it is the same song, the same melody; he sets off again from the beginning as soon as he has finished, and so on continually. It might be objected that it is impossible in any case to express anything immediate. And in a sense that is quite true, but in the first place it is in language that the immediacy of the spirit has its immediate expression, and second, in so far as the intervention of thought brings any change here, being spirit’s qualification it nevertheless stays essentially the same. Here, however, it is an immediacy of the sensual, which as such has quite another medium, where consequently the disproportion between the media makes the impossibility absolute.
If I were now to try to indicate in a single phrase the special character of Mozart’s music in the part of the work that interests us, I would say that it is merrily chirping, vigorous, sparkling with love. What I would stress in particular are the first aria and the chime of bells. The duet with Pamina, and later with Papagena, fall entirely outside the category of immediate musicality. But if one considers the first aria, one will surely approve of the predicates I have used and, if one pays closer attention to it, find also an opportunity to see what significance the musical element has, how it presents itself as the absolute expression of the idea, and how the latter is accordingly an immediately musical idea. As you know, Papageno accompanies his light-hearted cheerfulness on the flute. Every ear has certainly felt strangely moved by this accompaniment. But the more one considers it, and the more one sees the mythical Papageno in Papageno, the more expressive and characteristic one will find it; one doesn’t tire of hearing it again and again, because it is an absolutely adequate expression of Papageno’s whole life; Papageno, whose life is an incessant twittering of this kind, who, constantly carefree, chirps on in all idleness, and who is happy and pleased because this is the content of his life, happy in his work and happy in his song. As you know, things are arranged so very profoundly in the opera that the flutes of Tamino and Papageno correspond with each other. Yet what a difference! Tamino’s flute, from which the opera nevertheless takes its name, entirely fails of its effect. And why? Because Tamino is simply not a musical figure. This is part of the misconceived plot of the opera as a whole. Tamino becomes exceedingly tiresome and sentimental on his flute; and when one considers the rest of his development, his state of consciousness, one cannot help but think, every time he takes up his flute and plays a piece on it, of the farmer in Horace (rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis),22 except that Horace hasn’t given his farmer a flute for an unprofitable pastime. As a dramatic figure, Tamino is entirely beyond the musical, just as the spiritual development which the plot aims at realizing is in any case a totally unmusical idea. Tamino, indeed, has reached the point where the musical ceases, so his flute-playing is only a time-waster to drive away thought. For banishing thoughts is something music is supremely capable of, even evil thoughts, as indeed we say of David that his playing exorcised Saul’s evil spirit.23 On the other hand, a big deception lies implicit in this idea, for it does that only in so far as it carries consciousness back into immediacy and lulls it therein. The individual may therefore indeed feel happy in the moment of intoxication, but he only becomes the more unhappy. Quite parenthetically I permit myself an observation here. We have used music to heal the mentally disordered; in a sense we have also achieved our purpose, and yet it is an illusion. For when madness has a mental cause, it is always the result of the hardening of one or another point in consciousness. This hardening must be overcome, but for it truly to be overcome, one must go in quite the opposite direction from music. To employ music is to go altogether the wrong way and make the patient still more insane, even if he seems no longer to be so.
I can just as well let what I have said here about Tamino’s fluteplaying stand, without fear of seeing it misunderstood. I don’t mean to deny what has several times been conceded, that music can have its significance as an accompaniment, entering as it does, in that case, an alien sphere – that of language. The fault in The Magic Flute, however, is that the whole work is biased towards consciousness, and its tendency is therefore to do away with music while still remaining an opera; and not even this thought is made clear in the piece. The goal of its plot is ethically qualified love, or married love, and that is where the basic fault of the play lies. For let marriage be, ecclesiastically or secularly, what it will; one thing it is not, it is not musical; indeed it is absolutely unmusical.
So, musically, the first aria has its great significance through being the immediate-musical expression of Papageno’s whole life, and any history that finds its absolutely adequate expression in music is history only in a figurative sense. The chime of bells, on the other hand, is the musical expression of his activity, of which again one can only form an idea through music; it is enchanting, tempting, seductive, like the playing of the man who caused the fish to pause and listen.24
The lines, for which either Schikaneder or the Danish translator is responsible, are in general so crazy and stupid that it is almost inconceivable that Mozart brought as much out of them as he did. Letting Papageno say ‘I am a child of Nature’, and thus the same instant make himself a liar, may be taken as an example instar omnium [‘as good as any’]. An exception might be made of the words of the text in the first aria, about him putting the maidens he catches in his cage. That is, if one puts a little more into them than the author himself presumably has, they demonstrate precisely the inoffensive character of Papageno’s activity, as we have indicated it above.
We now leave the mythical Papageno. The actual Papageno’s fate need not concern us. We wish him joy with his little Papagena, and gladly let him seek his happiness in populating a primitive forest, or an entire continent, with nothing but Papagenos.
Third Stage
This stage is represented by Don Giovanni. Here I have no need, as above, to single out a particular section of the opera. The question here is one of summating, not separating, since the entire opera is essentially an expression of the idea and, except for one or two individual numbers, it pivots essentially upon that, gravitating with dramatic necessity towards the idea at its centre. So there is an opportunity, once again, to see in what sense I can call the preceding ‘stages’ by that name when I call the third stage Don Giovanni. I have already reminded you that they have no separate existence, and when one takes this third stage, which is really the whole stage, as one’s point of departure, they are less easily seen as one-sided abstractions or provisional anticipations, but rather as presentiments of Don Giovanni, except that there is always something left behind, which more or less justifies my using the expression ‘stage’, in that they are one-sided presentiments, each of them intimating one side only.
The contradiction in the first stage lay in the fact that desire could acquire no object, but was in possession of its object without having desired it, and therefore could not reach the point of desiring. In the second stage, the object appears in its multiplicity, but since desire seeks its object in this multiplicity, in a deeper sense it still has no object, it is not yet specified as desire. In Don Giovanni, on the other hand, desire is specified absolutely as desire, is connotationally and extensionally the immediate unity of the two preceding stages. The first stage desired the One ideally; the second desired the particular under the category of the multiple; the third stage is the unity of these. In the particular, desire has its absolute object, it desires the particular absolutely. Herein lies the seductiveness of which we shall speak later. Desire in this stage is therefore absolutely sound, victorious, triumphant, irresistible, and demonic. It must of course not be forgotten, therefore, that it is not a question here of desire in a particular individual but of desire as a principle, spiritually specified as that which spirit excludes. This is the idea of the spirit of sensuality, as was also intimated above. The expression of this idea is Don Giovanni, and the expression of Don Giovanni is, again, solely music. It is these two considerations in particular which will be constantly highlighted from different angles in what follows, from which also the proof will be indirectly furnished for this opera’s classic significance. To make it easier for the reader to keep an overview, however, I shall attempt to collect the scattered considerations under particular headings.
To present some unitary view of this music is not my intention, and in particular I shall, with the support of all good spirits, take care not to scare together a mass of platitudinous but very noisy predicates, or to betray in linguistic lasciviousness the impotence of language, the more so since I do not regard this impotence as an imperfection in language but as a high potency, yet am therefore also the more willing to recognize music within its own limits. What I do want to do, on the other hand, is in part to illuminate the idea from as many angles as possible, and its relation to language, and in this way constantly encompass more and more of the territory in which music has its home, scaring it into breaking cover, as it were, though without my being able to say more about it, once it can be heard, than, ‘Listen!’ […] [Nor shall I] give a running commentary on the music, for really that can only contain subjective contingencies and idiosyncrasies and can only appeal to something corresponding in the reader. […] What I shall do, however, is constantly ferret out the musical in the idea, the situation, etc., hear it out, and when I have brought the reader to the point of being musically receptive enough to seem to hear the music although hearing nothing, I have completed my task, I make myself mute, I say to the reader as to myself: listen! You friendly genii who protect all innocent love, to you I commit all my faculties, watch over the busy thoughts that they may be found worthy of their object, fashion my soul into a euphonious instrument, let the gentle breezes of eloquence pass swiftly over it, send the refreshment and blessing of fruitful moods! You righteous spirits who stand guard at the boundaries in the realm of beauty, watch over me lest, in muddled enthusiasm and a blind zeal to make Don Giovanni all, I do not do it injustice, demean it, make it something other than it really is, which is the highest! You powerful spirits who know how to stir the heart of man, stand by me that I may capture the reader, not in the net of passion, nor the artifices of eloquence, but in the eternal truth of conviction.
1. Sensual Genius Specified as Seduction
When the Don Juan idea originated is not known;25 all we know is that it belongs to Christianity, and through Christianity it belongs in turn to the Middle Ages. If one were unable to trace back the idea in human consciousness to that period of world history with any degree of certainty, a consideration of the inner nature of the idea would immediately dispel any doubt. The Middle Ages in general embody the idea of representation, partly consciously, partly unconsciously; the total is represented in a single individual, yet in such a way that only one aspect is determined as totality. The single individual who epitomizes the totality is therefore both more and less than an individual. Alongside this individual stands another individual who just as totally represents another side of life’s content, as with the knight and the scholastic, the ecclesiastic and the layman. The grand dialectic of life is thus invariably illustrated by representative individuals, who more often than not confront each other in pairs; life is always presented only in one aspect, and there is no hint of the great dialectical unity which embraces life under both aspects.26 The oppositions therefore usually stand, indifferently, outside each other. Of all this the Middle Ages knew nothing. Thus they themselves realized the representative idea unconsciously, while only a later reflection sees in them the idea. If the Middle Ages posit for their own consciousness an individual as representative of the idea, then they usually posit at his side another individual in relation to him. This relationship is then generally a comic one, where the one individual as it were compensates for the disproportionate greatness of the other in actual life. Thus the king has his fool by his side, Faust has his Wagner, Don Quixote Sancho Panza, and Don Giovanni Leporello. This arrangement, too, belongs essentially to the Middle Ages.
Thus the idea belongs to the Middle Ages; it is not, in the Middle Ages, the property of a single poet, it is one of those ideas with a primal power that spring from the popular consciousness with primordial aboriginality. The Middle Ages had to make the discord between flesh and spirit, which Christianity introduced to the world, a subject of their consideration, and to that end they made the contending forces individual objects of intuition. So Don Juan is, dare I say, flesh incarnate, or the inspiration of the flesh by the flesh’s own spirit. This is already sufficiently emphasized in the foregoing; the question I would call attention to here, however, is whether we ought to refer Don Juan to the earlier or later Middle Ages. That he stands in an essential relation to the Middle Ages is surely evident to everyone. Either he is, then, the dissenting, misunderstood anticipation of the erotic that was manifest in the knight errant, or chivalry is an as yet merely relative contrast to the spirit, and only when the opposition became still sharper did Don Juan appear as the sensual which opposes the spirit at all costs. The erotic of the age of chivalry bears a certain resemblance to that of the Greek consciousness; the latter is, like the former, specified as soul. The difference is that the soul specification here lies within a general specification of the spirit, or a specification of totality. The idea of femininity is constantly in motion, in many ways, which was not the case with the Greeks, where all were simply beautiful individuals with no hint of femininity as such. In the consciousness of the Middle Ages, too, the erotic of the knight had a rather conciliatory relation to the spiritual, even if the spiritual in its jealous austerity held it in suspicion. If one now supposes the principle of the spirit to be posited in the world, one can either imagine that the most glaring contrast, the most titanic disjunction came first, and later was gradually mitigated, in which case Don Juan belongs to the earlier Middle Ages; or, assuming instead that the relation developed progressively into this absolute opposition, as is also more natural, the spirit taking more and more of its shares out of the joint firm so as to act alone, whereupon the real skandalon27 appears, then Don Juan belongs to the later Middle Ages.
We are led on then to that point in time where the Middle Ages are about to come to an end, and where we meet a related idea, namely Faust – except that Don Juan must be placed a little earlier. As the spirit, exclusively specified as spirit, renounces this world, feels that this is not simply not its home but not even its scene of action, and withdraws up into the higher regions, it leaves the worldly behind as the arena for the power with which it has always lived in conflict and for which it now steps aside. As the spirit then frees itself from the world, sensuality appears in all its power; it offers no objection to the change, it too sees the advantage in being separated, and rejoices that the Church does not prevail on them to stay together, but hews asunder the bond that binds them. Stronger than ever before, sensuality now awakens in all its richness, in all its rapture and exultation, and just as that recluse in nature, the reticent echo that never speaks first to anyone or speaks without being asked, found such great pleasure in the knight’s hunting horn and his love ballads, in the baying of hounds, the snorting of horses, that it never tired of repeating these over and over again and, in the end, completely under its breath, so as not to forget them, so the whole world became an abode for sensuality’s worldly spirit, echoing from all sides, while the spirit had abandoned the world. The Middle Ages have as much to say of a mountain not found on any map; it is called Venusberg.28 There the sensual has its home, there it has its wild pleasures, for it is a kingdom, a state. In this kingdom language has no home, nor thought’s sobriety, nor the laborious business of reflection. All one hears there is the elemental voice of passion, the play of the appetites, the wild din of intoxication; indulgence, only, in an eternal tumult. The first-born of this kingdom is Don Juan. This is not yet to say that it is the realm of sin, for we must grasp it at the moment when it appears in aesthetic indifference. Not until reflection enters does it present itself as the realm of sin, but then Don Juan is slain, the music comes to an end, one sees only the despairing defiance which impotently casts its negative vote but can find no constituency, not even in musical sounds. When sensuality presents itself as what is to be excluded, as what the spirit will have nothing to do with, though still without the latter’s having passed judgement on it or condemned it, then the sensual assumes the form of the demonic in aesthetic indifference. It is just a matter of a moment; soon everything is changed; then the music too has ceased. Faust and Don Juan are the Titans and giants of the Middle Ages, who although no different from those of antiquity in the grandeur of their endeavours, certainly differ from them in standing in isolation, in not combining their forces before storming heaven. All the power is gathered in just one individual.
Don Juan, consequently, is the expression of the demonic specified as the sensual; Faust is the expression of the demonic specified as the spiritual which the Christian spirit excludes. These ideas are essentially related to each other, and they bear many similarities; one might therefore expect them to have in common that both are preserved in legends. We know this is true of Faust. […] But no such legend is to be found concerning Don Juan. […] There has probably been a legend all the same, but in all likelihood it has been confined to just a few hints. […] It is well known that Don Juan existed far back in time as a booth-theatre piece. Indeed, that may very likely be its origin. But there the idea was conceived comically; remarkable as it is in general how proficient the Middle Ages were in furnishing ideals, they could equally be relied on to see the comic side of the larger-than-life dimensions of the ideal. To make Don Juan a braggart who imagined he had seduced every girl, to let Leporello believe his lies, was surely not an entirely infelicitous basis for comedy. And even if that is not how it was, even if that was not the conception, still the comic twist could not have failed to turn up, since it lies in the contradiction between the hero and the theatre he moves within. Thus one may also let the Middle Ages tell of heroes so powerfully built that their eyes were a foot apart, but if an ordinary person were to come on stage and pretend to have eyes a foot apart, the comic would be in full swing.
These remarks on the legend of Don Juan would have found no place here had they not served some closer relation to the subject under investigation, if they did not serve to direct thought to the once determined goal. I imagine that the reason why this idea, compared with that of Faust, has so poor a past has to do with the fact that so long as nobody realized that music was its proper medium, there was something mysterious in it. Faust is idea, but an idea which is also essentially individual. To imagine the spiritualdemonic concentrated in an individual is the prerogative of thought, while to conceive the sensual in an individual is impossible. Don Giovanni constantly hovers between being idea – that is to say, energy, life – and individual. But this hovering is the vibrating of music. When the sea is agitated the foaming waves form images, as though creatures, in this upheaval. It is as if these creatures set the waves in motion, and yet it is the contrary action of the waves which creates them. Similarly, Don Giovanni is an image that constantly appears but gains neither form nor substance, an individual who is constantly being formed but not finished, of whose life history one can form no more definite an impression than one can by listening to the tumult of the waves. When Don Giovanni is conceived in this way, there is meaning and profound significance in everything. If I imagine some particular individual, if I see him or hear him speak, it becomes comic that he has seduced 1,003; as soon as he is a particular individual the accent falls in quite another place, for now it is those whom he has seduced, and in what manner, that are highlighted. The naivety of ballads and popular belief can successfully express such things without a suspicion of the comical; for reflection that is impossible. When he is interpreted in music, on the other hand, I do not have a particular individual, I have the power of nature, the demonic, which as little tires of seducing, or is done with seducing, as the wind is tired of raging, the sea of surging, or a waterfall of cascading down from its height. In this respect, the number of the seduced might just as well be any number at all, or a far greater one. Often it is not an easy task, when translating the text of an opera, to do it so exactly that the translation is not merely singable but also harmonizes reasonably with the textual meaning and thus with the music. To illustrate how sometimes this may not matter at all, I can mention the number in the list in Don Giovanni without treating the matter as offhandedly as people usually do and taking such things to have nothing to do with the matter. On the contrary, aesthetically I take the matter extremely seriously, and that is the reason I think it unimportant. I would, however, commend one feature of this number 1,003: it is odd and accidental, which is not at all unimportant, for it gives the impression that the list is by no means closed, but on the contrary that Don Giovanni is on the move. One almost begins to pity Leporello who has not only, as he says himself, to stand watch outside the door, but to carry on so complicated a system of book-keeping withal that it could keep a practised departmental secretary busy.
The way in which sensuality is conceived in Don Giovanni – as a principle – is one in which it has never been conceived before; for this reason the erotic is also defined by another predicate: the erotic here is seduction. Curiously enough, the idea of a seducer is entirely absent in the Greek consciousness. Far be it from me to want to praise the Greeks on that account, for gods as well as men were notoriously indiscreet in their love affairs; nor do I criticize Christianity, for after all it has the idea only as something external to it. The reason why the Greek consciousness lacks this idea is that its whole life is specified as individuality. The aspect of soul is thus predominant or always in harmony with the sensual. Greek love, therefore, was of the soul, not sensual, and it is this that inspires the modesty which rests over all Greek love. They fell in love with a girl, they set heaven and earth in motion to possess her; when they succeeded, perhaps they tired of her and sought a new love. In their inconstancy they may, indeed, bear a certain resemblance to Don Giovanni and, to mention just one example, Hercules could surely produce a fair-sized list, considering that he sometimes helped himself to families numbering up to fifty daughters, and like a family son-in-law, according to some reports, had his way with all of them in a single night. Still, he differs essentially from Don Giovanni; he is no seducer. For when one considers Greek love, it is according to its own lights essentially faithful just because it is of the soul; and it is some accidental factor in the particular individual that he loves many, and with regard to the many he loves, it is again accidental every time he loves a new one; when he is in love with one he does not think of the next. Don Giovanni, on the other hand, is from tip to toe a seducer. His love is not of the soul but sensual, and sensual love is not according to its own lights faithful but absolutely faithless; it loves not one but all, that is to say, it seduces all. For it exists only in the moment, but the moment, in terms of its concept, is the sum of moments, and so we have the seducer.
Chivalrous love, too, is of the soul and, therefore, according to its own lights essentially faithful; only sensual love is, in its own lights, essentially faithless. But this, its faithlessness, manifests itself also in another way; it becomes simply a repetition. Love from the soul is dialectical in a twofold sense. In the first place, it has in it the doubt and disquiet as to whether it will also be happy, see its desire fulfilled, and be requited. This anxiety is something sensual love does not have. Even a Jupiter has doubts about his victory, and this cannot be otherwise; indeed, he himself cannot wish it otherwise. With Don Giovanni this is not the case; he cuts matters short and must always be considered absolutely victorious. This might seem an advantage to him, but it is really an impoverishment. Love from the soul has, secondly, yet another dialectic, for it differs in relation to every single individual who is the object of love. Therein lies its wealth, its full-bodied content. Such is not the case with Don Giovanni. He has no time for this, for him everything is merely a matter of the moment. To catch sight of her and love her, that was one and the same. In a sense one may say the same of love from the soul, but in that there is also just the suggestion of a beginning. For Don Giovanni it is true in a different way. To catch sight of her and to love her are the same thing, that is in the moment; the very same moment everything is over, and the same endlessly repeats itself.
If one imagines Don Giovanni specified as soul, it becomes ridiculous and a self-contradiction, not even in accord with the idea, to posit 1,003 in Spain. It becomes an exaggeration which has a disturbing effect even if one were to entertain the fancy that one was considering him in an ideal way. If then we have no other medium for describing this love than language, we are at a loss, for as soon as we abandon the naivety that can insist, in all innocence, that there were 1,003 in Spain, we need something more, namely the individualization in soul. The aesthetic is not at all satisfied that everything should be thus lumped together, and wants to astonish with numbers. Love from the soul moves precisely in the rich multiplicity of the individual life, where the nuances are what are really significant. Sensual love, on the other hand, can lump everything together. What is essential for it is woman quite in the abstract, and at most distinctions of the more sensual kind. Love from the soul is a continuation in time, sensual love a disappearance in time, but the medium which expresses this is precisely music. This is something music is excellently fitted to accomplish, since it is far more abstract than language and therefore does not express the particular but the general in all its generality, and yet it expresses the general, not in reflective abstraction, but in the concreteness of immediacy.
As an example of what I mean, I shall discuss in a little more detail the servant’s second aria: the aria listing the seduced. This may be regarded as Don Giovanni’s real epic. So make this experiment if you doubt the truth of what I say! Imagine a poet more happily endowed by nature than any before him, give him an abundance of expression, give him mastery and authority of the forces of language, let everything in which there is the breath of life be obedient to him, deferring to his slightest gesture, let everything wait in readiness for his command, let him be surrounded by a numerous band of light skirmishers, fleet-footed messengers who overtake thought in its swiftest flight, let nothing escape him, not the slightest movement, let there be no secret left for him, nothing unutterable, in all the world – then give him the task of celebrating Don Giovanni epically in song, of unfolding the list of the seduced. What will be the result? He will never be finished! The epic has the defect, if you will, that it can go on as long as needs must; his hero, the improviser, Don Giovanni, can go on as long as needs must. The poet will then enter into the multiplicity, there will always be enough there to give pleasure but he will never achieve the effect that Mozart has obtained. For even if he finally finished, he would not have said the half of what Mozart has expressed in this one piece. Now Mozart has not even embarked upon the multiplicity; what he deals with are certain large configurations of passing events. This has its sufficient reason in the very medium, in music, which is too abstract to express the differences. The musical epic thus becomes something comparatively short, and yet it has in an incomparable manner the epic quality of going on as long as need be, since one can always let it begin again and hear it over and over again, precisely because it expresses the general in the concreteness of immediacy. This is not Don Giovanni as a particular individual that we hear, not his speech, but we hear the voice, the voice of sensuality, and we hear it through the longing for femininity. The only way in which Don Giovanni can become epic is by constantly finishing and constantly starting over again, for his life is the sum of mutually repellent moments that lack any coherence; his life is as moment the sum of moments, as sum of moments the moment.
In this generality, in this hovering between being individual and force of nature, lies Don Giovanni. As soon as he becomes individual the aesthetic acquires quite different categories. Therefore it is quite proper, and has a deep inner significance, that in the seduction that occurs in the piece, that of Zerlina, the girl should be a common peasant girl. Hypocritical aestheticians who, under the show of understanding poets and composers, do all they can to help us misunderstand them, will perhaps instruct us that Zerlina is an uncommon girl. Anyone who thinks that shows that he has totally misunderstood Mozart and is using the wrong categories. That he misunderstands Mozart is clear enough, for Mozart has been at pains to keep Zerlina as insignificant as possible. […] If Don Giovanni’s love were specified other than as sensual, if he were a seducer in a spiritual sense (something which will be a subject for consideration later), then it would have been a radical fault in the piece that the heroine in the seduction which dramatically engages us is a little peasant girl. The aesthetic would require that Don Juan be set a more difficult task. But for Don Giovanni these differences are of no importance. If I could imagine him making such a speech about himself, perhaps he’d say, ‘You are wrong, I am no husband who needs an ordinary girl for my happiness; every girl has what makes me happy, and so I take them all.’ It is in a similar way that we must understand the words I touched on earlier, ‘Even coquettes threescore years old’, or in another place: pur chè porti la gonella, voi sapete quel chè fà.29 For Don Giovanni every girl is an ordinary girl, every love affair an everyday story. Zerlina is young and pretty, and she is a woman, that is the peculiarity she shares with hundreds of others, but it is not the uncommon that Don Giovanni desires but the general, what she has in common with every woman. If that is not how it is, then Don Giovanni ceases to be absolutely musical, the aesthetic calls for spoken lines; but then since that is indeed how it is, Don Giovanni is absolutely musical.
I will throw light on this from another side too, from the inner structure of the piece. For Don Giovanni, Elvira is a dangerous enemy. This is frequently stressed in the dialogue we owe to the Danish translator. Sure enough, it is a mistake to give him spoken lines, but that doesn’t mean that the lines might not include the occasional good comment. Thus Don Giovanni is afraid of Elvira. Now presumably some aesthetician thinks he can give a meticulous explanation of this with some longwinded chit-chat about Elvira’s being an uncommon girl, etc. This misses the point entirely. She is a danger to him because she has been seduced. In the same sense, exactly the same sense, Zerlina is a danger to him when she is seduced. As soon as she is seduced she is lifted up into a higher sphere, which is a consciousness in her that Don Giovanni himself does not have. Therefore she is a danger. Thus, again, it is not through the accidental but the general that she is dangerous for him.
So Don Giovanni is a seducer; his eroticism is seduction. This says much if understood aright, little if grasped with typical lack of clarity. We have already seen that the concept of a seducer is essentially modified in the case of Don Giovanni, as the object of his desire is the sensual and that alone. This was important for showing the musical in Don Giovanni. In antiquity the sensual found expression in the silent stillness of plastic art; in the Christian world the sensual had to fume in all its impatient passion. Although one can thus truly say that Don Giovanni is a seducer, this expression, which can have a disturbing effect on the weak brains of certain aestheticians, has often occasioned misunderstanding, inasmuch as they have scraped together whatever could be said of such a one and transferred it without further ado to Don Giovanni. At times they have demonstrated their own cunning in running Don Giovannis to earth, at others talked themselves hoarse explaining his intrigues and wiles; in short the word ‘seducer’ has given everyone the chance to do him down as best they can, to contribute their mite30 to the total misunderstanding. Of Don Giovanni we must use the word ‘seducer’ with great caution, in so far, that is, as it is more incumbent on us to say something true than just anything. This is not because Don Giovanni is too good, but because he simply doesn’t come within ethical categories. I would therefore rather call him a deceiver, since there is always a greater ambiguity in that word. Being a seducer requires always a certain reflection and consciousness, and once this is present one may talk of cunning and intrigues, and of wily measures. This consciousness is something Don Giovanni lacks. So he does not seduce. He desires, and this desire acts seductively. To that extent he seduces. He savours the satisfaction of desire; as soon as he has savoured it he seeks a new object, and so on endlessly. So he does indeed deceive, though not in such a way that he plans his deception in advance; it is the power of sensuality itself that deceives the seduced, and it is more of a kind of Nemesis. He desires and stays constantly in a state of desire, and he constantly savours its satisfaction. To be a seducer he lacks the time ahead in which to lay his plans, and the time behind in which to become conscious of his act. A seducer should therefore be in possession of a power which Don Giovanni does not have, however well equipped he is otherwise – the power of speech. As soon as we give him that power he ceases to be musical, and then the aesthetic interest becomes quite another.
Achim von Arnim tells somewhere of a seducer in quite another style, a seducer who falls under ethical categories. Of him he uses a form of expression which, in its truth, boldness and pithiness, can almost match a stroke of the bow in Mozart. He says he could talk with a woman in such a way that, if the devil caught him, he could talk himself free if only he was given a chance to talk with the devil’s great-grandmother.31 This is the real seducer; the aesthetic interest here is also different; namely, how, the method. There is therefore something of profound significance in what has perhaps escaped most people’s attention, that Faust, who is a reproduction of Don Giovanni, seduces only one girl, while Don Giovanni seduces hundreds; but then this one girl is, in terms of intensity, seduced and destroyed in quite another way from all those whom Don Giovanni has deceived. Simply because Faust, as a reproduction, has in him the category of spirit. The power of such a seducer is speech, that is to say, lies. A few days ago I heard one soldier speak to another about a third who had deceived a girl. He gave no extensive description, yet the expression he used was quite excellent: ‘He were able to do such with lies and such.’ This seducer is of quite another kind than Don Giovanni and differs essentially from him, as can be seen from the fact that he and his activity are extremely unmusical and aesthetically belong in the category of the interesting. The object of his desire is therefore, if one has the right aesthetic conception of him, also something more than the merely sensual.
But what is this force with which Don Giovanni seduces? It is the force of desire, the energy of sensual desire. In each woman he desires the whole of femininity, and in this lies the sensually idealizing power with which he at once beautifies and overcomes his prey. The reflection of this gigantic passion beautifies and unfolds the desired, it irradiates a heightened beauty with its refulgence. As, with a seductive glow, the enthusiast’s flame illumines even those not concerned, so Don Giovanni transfigures every girl in a far deeper sense, since his relation to her is essential. So for him all finite differences fade away in comparison with the main thing: being a woman. The older women he rejuvenates into womanhood’s beautiful middle age; children he practically matures in a twinkling; all that is woman is his prey (pur chè porti la gonella, voi sapete quel chè fà). On the other hand, it would be quite wrong to take his sensuality for blindness; instinctively he knows very well how to make distinctions, and above all he idealizes. If for a moment I think back to a preceding stage, to the Page, the reader may recall that already in discussing him I compared some lines of his with some of Don Giovanni’s. The mythical Page I let stay, I let the real one go off to the army. If I now imagined the mythical Page having liberated himself, having got going, then I would call to mind a line of the Page’s which suits Don Giovanni. For as Cherubino, light as a bird and daring, jumps out of the window, this makes such a powerful impression on Susanna that she almost swoons, and when she recovers she exclaims, ‘See how he runs! My, won’t he have luck with the girls!’ That is quite right of Susanna, and the reason for her swooning is not just the idea of the daring leap, but rather that he had already succeeded with her. The Page is the future Don Giovanni, though this is not to be understood, ridiculously, as though the Page would become Don Giovanni just by growing older. For Don Giovanni not only has luck with the girls, he makes them feel lucky too – and unlucky, but curiously enough, in such a way that they would have it thus, and it was a foolish girl who did not want to be unlucky in order just once to have been lucky with Don Giovanni.32 In continuing to call Don Giovanni a seducer, therefore, I am not at all imagining him slyly drafting his plans, craftily calculating the effect of his intrigues. His deception is due to the genius of sensuality, whose incarnation it is as though he was. He lacks shrewd circumspection; his life is effervescent like the wine with which he fortifies himself, his life is excited like the tones which accompany his joyous feast, he is always triumphant. He needs no preparation, no plan, no time, for he is always ready, the force is always in him and the desire too, and only when he desires is he in his proper element. He is seated at the table, he raises the goblet, happy as a god – he rises with napkin in hand, ready to attack. If Leporello rouses him in the middle of the night, he wakes up always certain of victory. But this force, this power words cannot express, only music can give us an idea of it, for it is inexpressible in reflection and thought. The cunning of an ethically specified seducer I can clearly present in words, and music would presume in vain to perform that task. With Don Giovanni the converse is the case. What is this force? No one can say. Even if I asked Zerlina before she went to the ball, ‘What is this force with which he captivates you?’, she would reply, ‘No one knows’; and I would say, ‘Well said, my child! You speak more wisely than the wise men of India, richtig, das weiss man nicht; and the unfortunate thing is that I can’t tell you either.’
This force in Don Giovanni, this omnipotence, this gaiety, only music can express, and I know no other description for it than ‘exuberant good cheer’. So when Kruse33 has Don Giovanni say as he comes on stage at Zerlina’s wedding, ‘Cheer up, children! You are all dressed as though for your own weddings!’, he is quite right and perhaps more than he thinks. For the gaiety is something he brings with him, and as far as the wedding goes, it is not insignificant that they are all dressed as though for their own weddings; for Don Giovanni is not just Zerlina’s man, he celebrates with sport and song the weddings of all the young girls in the parish. What wonder then that they flock round him, the happy girls! Nor will they be disappointed, for he is enough for them all. Flattery, sighs, bold glances, soft handclasps, secret whisperings, dangerous proximity, tempting withdrawal – and yet these are only the lesser mysteries, the gifts before the wedding.34 It is a delight for Don Giovanni to look out over such a rich harvest; he takes care of the whole parish, and yet perhaps it does not cost him as much time as Leporello uses in the office.
These considerations bring us back to the main topic of this inquiry, that Don Giovanni is absolutely musical. He desires sensually, seduces with the demonic power of sensuality, he seduces all. The spoken word is no part of him, for that would straightaway make him a reflective individual. He has no substance of this kind but hurries on in a perpetual vanishing, just like music, of which it is true that it is over as soon as it stops playing and only comes back into existence when it starts again. So if I were now to raise the question of Don Giovanni’s looks – is he handsome, young or old, about how old? – it is just a concession on my part, and anything I say on this score can only expect admission here in the way that a tolerated sect is given room in the State Church. Hand-some, not altogether young; if I were to suggest his age, my proposal would be thirty-three, that being the age of a generation. The trouble with going into questions of this kind is that one loses the whole by dwelling on the parts, as if it were through his good looks, or whatever else might be mentioned, that Don Giovanni seduces. One sees him then, but no longer hears him, and then he is lost. If, as it were, to do my bit in helping the reader form a mental picture of Don Giovanni, I said, ‘Look, there he stands, see how his eyes blaze, his lips curl in a smile, so certain is he of his victory; look at his regal glance, which demands the things that are Caesar’s; see how gracefully he enters into the dance, how proudly he stretches out his hand, how happy the one to whom it is offered’ – or if I said, ‘Look, there he stands in the shadow of the forest, he leans against a tree, he accompanies himself on a guitar, and look! there disappears a young girl among the trees, frightened as a startled fawn, but he is in no hurry, he knows she seeks him’ – or if I said, ‘There he rests by the shore of the lake in the pale night, so beautiful that the moon pauses and relives its youthful love, so beautiful that the young girls from the town would give much to dare steal up on him and use the moment of darkness, while the moon rises up again to illumine the heavens, to kiss him.’ If I did this, the attentive reader would say, ‘Look, now he’s spoiled everything for himself, he has forgotten that Don Giovanni is not to be seen but heard.’ So I do not do that but say, ‘Listen to Don Giovanni; that’s to say, if you cannot get an idea of Don Giovanni by listening to him, you will never get one. Hear the beginning of his life; as lightning twists out of the thunder cloud’s murk, he bursts forth from the depth of earnest, swifter than lightning, less constant than it yet just as measured. Hear how he plunges into life’s diversity, how he dashes himself against its solid dam, hear these light, dancing tones of the violin, hear the beckoning of joy, hear the exultation of desire, hear the festive bliss of enjoyment; hear his wild flight; he hurries past even himself, ever faster, ever more impetuously; hear the murmur of love, hear the whisper of temptation, hear the swirl of seduction, hear the stillness of the moment – listen, listen, listen, to Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
2. Other Adaptations of Don Juan, Considered in Relation to the Musical Interpretation
The Faust motif, as we know, has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways; but this is not so with Don Juan. That may seem strange, especially as the latter idea represents a far more universal phase in the development of the individual life than does the first. However, this can easily be explained by the fact that the Faustian motif presupposes a degree of spiritual development that makes interpretation far more natural. There is also the fact, of which I reminded you above, that there is no corresponding Don Juan legend, that people have been dimly aware of the difficulty over the medium until Mozart discovered the medium and the idea. Only since then has the idea acquired its true dignity and again, more than ever, given content to a phase of the individual’s life, but so satisfactorily that the need to encapsulate the experience separately in imagination was no longer a poetic necessity.
This, once more, is indirect proof of the absolute classic value of this Mozartian opera. The ideal in this direction having now already found its perfect artistic expression, people could indeed be tempted by it, but not to poetic activity. Tempting Mozart’s music has no doubt been, for where is the young man for whom there have not been moments when he would have given half his fortune to be a Don Juan, or perhaps all of it; when he would have given half his lifetime to be a Don Juan for a year, or perhaps the whole of it. But that’s how it was; those of a deeper nature who were affected by the idea found everything in Mozart’s music, even the gentlest breeze; they found in its passionate grandeur a full-toned expression of what stirred in their own hearts; they sensed how every mood strained in the music’s direction, just as the brook hurries on to lose itself in the infinity of the ocean. These natures found in the Mozartian Don Juan as much text as commentary, and while they were thus carried along and down in its music and enjoyed the delight of losing themselves, they also gained the riches of wonder. The music of Mozart was in no way too constricted; quite the contrary, their own moods were broadened, assumed a larger-than-life dimension, as they recaptured them again in Mozart. Those of a lower nature who have no inkling of infinity do not grasp hold of it; of course the dabblers who took themselves to be a Don Juan because they had pinched a peasant girl’s cheek, flung their arms round a waitress, or made a little maiden blush, understood neither the idea nor Mozart, nor how to produce a Don Juan themselves, other than a ridiculous monstrosity, a family idol who perhaps might have seemed a true Don Juan, the epitome of all attractiveness, to the dim, sentimental eyes of some cousins. Faust has never been able to find expression in this sense, and, as noted above, never will, because the idea is far more concrete. Though an interpretation of Faust may deserve to be called perfect, a succeeding generation can still give birth to a new Faust; while Don Juan, due to the abstractness of the motif, lives eternally for all ages, and the thought of providing a Don Juan after Mozart cannot but be like wanting to write a post-Homerian Iliad in an even more profound sense.
Now, even if that is so, it by no means follows that individual talents should not have tried their hands at interpreting Don Juan differently. Everyone knows they have, but what no one has perhaps noticed is that the representative type for all interpretations is essentially Molière’s Don Juan.35 though again, this is much older than Mozart’s, and is a comedy. It is to Mozart’s Don Giovanni what a fairy-tale in Musaeus’s interpretation is to an adaptation of Tieck’s.36 So really I can confine myself to a discussion of the Don Juan of Molière and in attempting an aesthetic appraisal of it I can judge the others at the same time. […]
We have already indicated the turning-point in interpreting Don Juan: as soon as we give him spoken lines everything changes, for the reflection which motivates the spoken line refracts him out of the obscurity in which he is audible only musically. For that reason Don Juan might perhaps seem best interpreted as ballet. And people are fairly familiar with the fact that he has indeed been interpreted in that way.37 One has to praise this interpretation, however, for recognizing what are after all its limitations, something which has led to its confining itself to the final scene, where the passion of Don Juan can be made most easily visible through the pantomimic play of muscles. The result again is that Don Juan is represented not according to his essential but to his accidental passion, and the playbill for such a performance always has more in it than the piece itself; it tells us, for instance, that it is Don Juan, the seducer Don Juan, whereas the ballet for all practical purposes only presents the pangs of despair, whose expression, seeing this can only be pantomime, Don Juan can have in common with many other despairing persons. What is essential in Don Juan cannot be represented in ballet, and everyone intuitively feels how ridiculous it would be to see Don Juan beguiling a girl with his dance steps and contrived gesticulations. Don Juan is an inward specification and so cannot become visible in this way or reveal himself in bodily forms and their movements, or in sculptured harmony.
Even if we were not to give him spoken lines, we could nevertheless imagine an interpretation of Don Juan using words as its medium. Indeed we have an example from Byron. That Byron was in many ways just the man to present a Don Juan is clear enough, and one may therefore be sure that the reason for the project’s miscarrying lay not in Byron himself but far deeper. Byron has dared to bring Don Juan into existence for us, to tell us of his childhood and youth, to reconstruct him from a context of finite life-circumstances. The result is to make Don Juan into a reflective personality who loses the ideality that is his in the traditional conception. I can detail here right away what changes occur in the idea. When Don Juan is interpreted musically I hear the whole of the infinity of passion in him, but also its infinite power which nothing can resist; I hear the wild craving of desire, but also that desire’s absolute triumphancy which it would be in vain for anyone to oppose. You only need to think once of the obstacle to realize that its function is merely to inflame the passion than put up any real resistance; the pleasure is magnified, the victory is certain and the obstacle only an incitement. A life agitated in this elemental way, demonically powerful and irresistible, that is what Don Juan conveys to me. This is his ideality, and this I can take uninterrupted pleasure in, because the music does not represent him to me as a person or individual, but as a power. If Don Juan is interpreted as an individual, that alone puts him in conflict with a world around him; as an individual he feels the pressure and chains of this environment; perhaps as a great individual he overcomes it, but one immediately feels that here the difficulties in the obstacles have a different role. It is on them that interest is essentially focused. But this brings Don Juan within the category of the interesting. Were we to resort to a bombastic show of words in representing him as absolutely victorious, we would feel immediately that this was not satisfactory, since it does not belong essentially to an individual as such to be victorious, and the crisis of conflict is called for.
The resistance the individual has to contend with can be partly an external resistance lying not so much in the object as in the environing world, partly a resistance in the object itself. Most interpretations of Don Juan have been mainly occupied with the former, because the element in the motif that has been retained is the need for him to be erotically victorious. On the other hand, I think that stressing the other side opens up the only prospect of a significant contrast to the musical Don Juan, while any interpretation lying in between is bound to contain imperfections. So that in the musical Don Juan one would then have the extensive seducer, in the other the intensive one. The latter Don Juan is not presented then as possessing his object by a single stroke, he is not the immediate seducer, he is the reflective seducer. What interests us is the astuteness, the cunning with which he can insinuate himself into a girl’s heart, the dominion he can acquire over it, the fascinating, systematic, progressive seduction. It becomes a matter of indifference how many he has seduced; what concerns us is the art, the thoroughness, the profound ingenuity with which he seduces. In the end the very enjoyment becomes so reflective that compared with the musical Don Juan’s enjoyment it becomes something else. The musical Don Juan enjoys the satisfaction, the reflective Don Juan enjoys the deception, enjoys the cunning. The immediate enjoyment is over, and a greater enjoyment is found in reflecting upon the enjoyment. There is a hint or two of this in Molière’s interpretation, only there is no chance of its coming into its own since all the rest of the interpretation interferes. Desire awakens in Don Juan because he sees one of the girls happy in her relation to the one she loves, and he begins by being jealous. This is a point of interest that would not occupy us at all in the opera, precisely because Don Giovanni is not a reflective individual. Once Don Juan is interpreted as a self-aware individual, we can achieve an ideality corresponding to the musical one only by transferring the matter to the psychological domain. Then one attains the ideality of intensity. For that reason Byron’s Don Juan must be considered a failure, because it expands itself epically. The immediate Don Juan has to seduce 1,003, the self-aware one has only to seduce one, and what occupies us is how he does it. The self-aware Don Juan’s seduction is a sleight-of-hand every single little step of which has its special significance; the musical Don Giovanni’s seduction is a flick of the wrist, the matter of a moment, quicker done than said. I am reminded of a tableau I once saw. A pretty young fellow, a real ladies’ man, was playing with a number of young girls who were all at that dangerous age when they are neither grown-up nor children. Among other things, they were amusing themselves by jumping over a ditch. He stood at the edge and helped them jump by taking them around the waist, lifting them lightly into the air, and then setting them down on the other side. It was a charming sight; I enjoyed him just as much as I enjoyed the young girls. Then I thought of Don Juan. They fling themselves into his arms, these young girls; then he grabs them, and just as briskly sets them down on the other side of life’s ditch.
The musical Don Juan is absolutely victorious and therefore, of course, also in complete command of all the means that can contribute to this victory. Or rather, he is in such absolute command of the means that it is as though he had no need to use them; that is, he does not use them as a means. Once he is a reflective individual it appears there is something there called the means. If the poet then grants him this, but also makes the opposition and obstacles so serious as to make victory doubtful, then Don Juan comes within the category of the interesting and in this regard one may think of several interpretations of Don Juan, up to the point where we reach what we earlier called intensive seduction. If the poet denies him the means, the interpretation falls into the category of comedy. I have never seen a perfect interpretation that brings him into the category of the interesting. On the other hand, of most interpretations of Don Juan it can truly be said that they approach comedy [which] can easily be explained by their adherence to Molière, in whose interpretation comedy lies dormant […] Once a passion is portrayed and denied the means of its satisfaction, either a tragic or a comic turn may be produced. You cannot properly produce a tragic turn where the motif appears entirely unwarranted, and that is why the comic is so likely. If I depict an addiction to gambling in some individual and then give this individual five dollars to lose, the effect is comic. This is not quite how it is with Molière’s Don Juan, but there is a similarity. If I place Don Juan in financial straits, harassed by creditors, then he immediately loses the ideality he has in the opera, and the effect is comic. The famous comedy scene in Molière,38 which has great value and also fits very well into the whole, ought therefore never to be introduced into the opera, where it has a totally distracting effect.
That the Molière interpretation aspires to the comic is shown not only by the comedy scene just mentioned, which in isolation would prove nothing at all; the whole plot bears its mark. Sganarelle’s first and last lines, the beginning and end of the whole piece, provide more than sufficient evidence of this. Sganarelle begins with a eulogy over a rare snuff, from which one learns among other things that he cannot be all that busy in this Don Juan’s service. He ends by complaining that he alone has been wronged. When one then considers that Molière, too, has the statue come and fetch Don Juan, and that despite Sganarelle’s also having witnessed this horror Molière nevertheless puts those words into his mouth, as though Sganarelle were saying that since the statue otherwise meddled in the exercise of justice on earth and the punishment of vice, it ought to have been ready to pay Sganarelle the wages due to him for long and faithful service to Don Juan, which his master had been unable to do because of his sudden departure – when one considers this, then indeed anyone will have a sense of the comical in Molière’s Don Juan. […] The hero of the piece, Don Juan, is anything but a hero; he is a subject of misfortune, who has presumably failed his finals and has now chosen another vocation. True, one learns that he is the son of a very distinguished man, who has also tried to inspire him to virtue and immortal enterprises by impressing upon him the great name of his forefathers, but this is so improbable in relation to the rest of his behaviour that one soon begins to suspect the whole thing of being a pack of lies fabricated by Don Juan himself. His conduct is not very chivalrous; one does not see him sword in hand clearing a path for himself through life’s difficulties; he deals out cuffs on the ear to this one and that; yes, he even reaches the point of coming to blows with one of the girls’ betrothed. So if Molière’s Don Juan really is a knight, the poet is very good at having us forget the fact and does all he can to show us a bully, an ordinary rake, who is not afraid of using his fists. Anyone who has had occasion to observe what we call a rake knows, too, that this class of people has a great predilection for the sea, and he will therefore find it quite as it should be that Don Juan should set eyes on a pair of skirts and then put out after them in a boat on Kallebostrand – a Sunday adventure, plus the fact that the boat capsizes. Don Juan and Sganarelle are almost drowned and are finally saved by Pedro and the tall Lucas, who were earlier betting whether it was a man or a stone, a wager that cost Lucas ten sous, which is almost too much for Lucas and for Don Juan. If all this then strikes one as appropriate, the impression becomes confused for a moment when one learns that Don Juan is also the fellow who has seduced Elvira, murdered the Commendatore, and so on, something one finds quite illogical and must once again explain as a lie in order to restore harmony. If Sganarelle is meant to give us an idea of the passion raging in Don Juan, his expression is such a travesty that it is impossible not to laugh, as when Sganarelle says to Gusman that, to get the one he wants, Don Juan would gladly marry her dog and cat, indeed what is worse, ‘and you into the bargain’; or when he remarks that his master has faith neither in love nor in medicine.
Now if Molière’s interpretation of Don Juan, regarded as a comic adaptation, were correct, then I should say no more about it here, since I am concerned in this inquiry only with the ideal interpretation and the significance of music for that. I could then be content with calling attention to the remarkable circumstance that only in music has Don Juan been interpreted ideally in the ideality he has in the traditional medieval conception. The absence of an ideal interpretation in the medium of words could then furnish indirect proof of the correctness of my proposition. Here, however, I can do better, precisely because Molière is not correct, and what has prevented him from being so is his having kept something of the ideal in Don Juan that is due to the traditional conception. It will again appear, on my pointing this out, that this could be essentially expressed, after all, only in music, and so I return to my proper thesis.
Right at the beginning of the first act of Molière’s Don Juan, Sganarelle makes a very long speech in which he wants to give us a conception of his master’s boundless passion and the multiplicity of his adventures. This speech exactly corresponds with the servant’s second aria in the opera. The speech has absolutely no other effect than comedy. […] It tries to give us some hint of his power, but the effect fails to materialize; only music can incorporate this factor because it describes Don Juan’s behaviour and lets us hear the power of seduction, at the same time as the list is unrolled for us.
In Molière, the statue arrives in the last act to fetch Don Juan. Even if the poet has tried to motivate the statue’s appearance by giving advance warning, this piece of stone always presents a dramatic stumbling-block. If Don Juan is interpreted ideally as force, as passion, then heaven itself must be set in motion. If he is not so interpreted, it is always ill-advised to use such drastic means. Really the Commendatore need not have inconvenienced himself. […] It would be quite in the spirit of modern comedy, which has no need of such great forces of destruction precisely because the motivating powers themselves are not so grandiose, to have Don Juan thrown into a debtor’s gaol. It would be quite consistent with it to let Don Juan learn the tedious constraints of reality. In the opera it is quite right that the Commendatore should reappear, but then his conduct too possesses an ideal truth. The music immediately makes the Commendatore into something more than a particular individual, his voice is expanded to that of a spirit. So, just as Don Giovanni himself is interpreted with aesthetic seriousness in the opera, so too is the Commendatore. In Molière he comes in with an ethical gravity and weightiness that make him almost ridiculous; in the opera he comes in with aesthetic lightness, metaphysical truth. No power in the piece, no power on earth has been able to coerce Don Giovanni; only a spirit, a ghost, can do that. If this is understood correctly it will again throw light on the interpretation of Don Juan. A spirit, a ghost, is a reproduction; this is the mystery in the return; but Don Giovanni can do everything, can put up with anything, except the reproduction of life, precisely because he is sensual life in its immediacy, the negation of which is spirit.
In Molière’s interpretation, Sganarelle becomes an inexplicable figure whose character is extremely confused. What causes the confusion is, again, that Molière has kept something of the traditional idea. As Don Giovanni is altogether a force, this also shows in the relation to Leporello. Leporello feels drawn to him, overwhelmed by him, is absorbed in him, and he becomes merely an instrument of his master’s will. This obscure, impenetrable sympathy is exactly what makes Leporello into a musical personality, and we find it quite in order that he does not manage to tear himself away from Don Giovanni. With Sganarelle it is different. In Molière, Don Juan is a particular individual, and so it is as to an individual that Sganarelle relates to him. If Sganarelle then feels indissolubly bound to Don Juan, it is no more than a modest aesthetic requirement to ask how this is to be explained. It is nothing to the purpose that Molière has him say that he cannot tear himself away from Don Juan, for neither reader nor spectator can see any rational ground for this, and a rational ground is just what is in question. Leporello’s inconstancy is well motivated in the opera, because compared with Don Giovanni he himself is closer to being an individual consciousness, and in him the Don Giovanni-life is therefore reflected differently, though without his really being able to penetrate it. In Molière, Sganarelle is sometimes worse, sometimes better than Don Juan, but it is unthinkable that he should not desert him when he does not even get his wages. If one were to imagine a unity in Sganarelle corresponding to the sympathetic musical opacity of Leporello in the opera, there would be nothing for it but to let it be a sottish partiality. Here again we see an example of how the musical must be invoked for Don Juan to be interpreted in his true ideality. The fault in Molière is not in interpreting him comically, but in not interpreting him correctly.
Molière’s Don Juan is also a seducer, but the piece gives us only an impoverished idea of his role. That Elvira, in Molière, is Don Juan’s spouse is undeniably rightly conceived, particularly for its comic effect. We see at once that what we have here is an ordinary person who uses promises of marriage to deceive a girl. Elvira thus loses all the ideal bearing that is hers in the opera, where she appears with no other weapon than that of her affronted womanhood, while here one imagines her wielding a marriage certificate; and Don Juan loses his seductive ambiguity by being both a young man and an experienced husband, that is to say, practised in all his extramarital escapades. How he has deceived Elvira, with what means he has enticed her out of the convent – of this a number of Sganarelle’s lines are supposed to enlighten us; but since the seduction scene in the play gives us no opportunity to admire Don Juan’s art, our confidence in these bits of information is naturally weakened. Of course inasmuch as Molière’s Don Juan is comic, this was hardly necessary. But since he would still have us understand that his Don Juan really is the hero Don Juan, who has deluded Elvira and killed the Commendatore, we readily see where Molière has gone wrong. But we are then forced to consider whether this was not really because Don Juan can never be represented as a seducer except with the help of music, unless, as noted above, one wishes to go into the psychology of it, which it is hard to invest with dramatic interest.
Nor, in Molière, does one hear him deluding the two young girls, Mathurine and Charlotte. The deception takes place off-stage, and since Molière here, too, gives us to understand that Don Juan has made them promises of marriage, again we get but a meagre idea of his talent. To delude a young girl with a promise of marriage is a very inferior art, and it by no means follows from the fact that someone is low enough to do this that he is high enough to be called Don Juan. The only scene which seems to show us Don Juan in his seducing – though scarcely seductive – activities is the scene with Charlotte. But to tell a young peasant girl that she is pretty, that she has sparkling eyes, to ask her to turn round in order to observe her figure, all this betrays nothing exceptional in Don Juan, only that he is a lewd fellow who looks over a girl as a dealer does a horse. One can gladly concede a comic effect to the scene, and if that is all it was intended to have I would not discuss it here. But since this, his notorious attempt, bears no relation to the many affairs he must have had, this scene too, directly or indirectly, contributes to showing the imperfection in the comedy. Molière seems to have wanted to make something more of him, seems to have wanted to preserve the ideal in him, but he lacks the medium, and therefore everything that actually happens falls rather flat. In general, one can say that in Molière’s Don Juan it is only historically that we get to know that he is a seducer; we do not see it dramatically. […]
Perhaps, in conclusion, I can elucidate what has been expounded here by considering an often-made remark, that Molière’s Don Juan is more moral than Mozart’s. However, if properly understood, this is precisely to eulogize the opera. In the opera there isn’t just talk of a seducer, Don Giovanni is a seducer, and one cannot deny that in its details the music can often be seductive enough. But that is as it should be, and this is exactly its greatness. To say, therefore, that the opera is immoral is a piece of foolishness originating in people who do not know how to grasp a whole but are captured by details. The definitive aspiration in the opera is extremely moral, and the impression it produces absolutely salutary, because everything is big, everything has genuine, unadorned pathos, the passion of pleasure no less than of seriousness, of enjoyment no less than of wrath.
3. The Inner Musical Structure of the Opera
Although the title of this section may be thought self-explanatory, for safety’s sake I shall nevertheless point out that it is of course not my intention to give an aesthetic appraisal of Don Giovanni, or a demonstration of the dramatic structure in the text. One must always be very cautious in making such distinctions, especially with a classic work. For, as I have already frequently stressed in the foregoing and repeat yet again, Don Juan can only be expressed in music, something I have myself essentially experienced through the music, so I should guard in every way against giving the impression that the music enters from outside. If the matter is treated in that way, then admire the music in this opera as much as you will, you will not have grasped its absolute significance. […] It is not my intention to examine the whole opera so much as the opera as a whole, not dealing with its single parts separately, but incorporating these as far as possible in my examination, so as to see them not apart from but in their connection with the whole.
In a drama the main interest centres quite naturally on what we call the hero of the piece; the other characters assume only a subordinate and relative importance. However, the more the drama is penetrated with the discriminatory power of its own inner reflexivity, the more the minor characters, too, assume a relative absoluteness, if I may so put it. This is by no means a fault, on the contrary it is an advantage, just as the view of the world that can take in only single outstanding individuals and their meaning for its development, but not the common man, may in some sense be a higher way of looking at it, but is lower than one that includes what is less in its equally great validity. The dramatist will only succeed in this to the extent that there is no incommensurable remainder, nothing of the mood from which the drama proceeds, that is to say, nothing of the mood qua mood, but everything is converted into the sacred coin of the drama: action and situation. To the extent that the dramatist succeeds in this, the general impression his work produces will be correspondingly less a mood than a thought, an idea. The more the total impression of a drama is a mood, the more certain one can be that the poet’s own first intimation of it has been in the mood, and he has allowed it progressively to come into being from that and has not seized it in the form of an idea and let this unfold itself dramatically. Dramas of the latter kind suffer from an abnormal preponderance of lyricism. This is a fault in a drama, but by no means in an opera. What preserves the unity in the opera is the basic tone that carries the whole production.
What has been said here about the total dramatic effect applies in turn to the drama’s individual parts. Were I to characterize the effect of drama in a single phrase, inasmuch as it differs from that produced by any other literary form, I would say that drama achieves its effect in contemporaneity. In drama I see mutually unrelated factors brought together in the situation, the unity of action. The more then the discrete factors are separated, the more profoundly the dramatic situation is interpenetrated with reflection, the less the dramatic unity will be a mood and the more a definite thought. But just as the totality of the opera cannot be brought fully to consciousness as in drama proper, so too with the musical situation, which though indeed dramatic has nevertheless its unity in the mood. The musical situation has contemporaneity just like every dramatic situation, but the effect of the forces is a simultaneous sound, a concord, a harmony, and the impression made by the musical situation is the unity achieved by hearing together what sounds together. The more the drama is interpenetrated with reflection, the more the mood is transmuted into action. The less action, the more the lyrical element dominates. In opera this is quite as it should be; opera is less concerned with character delineation and action as its immanent goal; it is not reflective enough for that. On the other hand, in opera passion, unreflective and substantial, finds its expression. The musical situation lies in a unity of mood in the distinct voices. It is exactly the characteristic of music to be able to preserve the plurality of voices in the unity of mood.39 […]
Dramatic interest calls for a rapid forward movement, an excited rhythm, what one might call the immanently increasing tempo of the fall. The more the drama is interpenetrated with reflection, the more uninterruptedly it hurries along. If, on the other hand, there is a bias in favour of the lyrical or the epic element, this expresses itself in a kind of numbness which allows the situation to go to sleep, makes the dramatic procedure and progress slow and laborious. No such haste is inherent in opera; a certain lingering is characteristic, a certain self-expansion in time and space. The action lacks the precipitancy of the fall, or its direction, but moves more horizontally. The mood is not sublimated in character and action. Consequently, the action in an opera can only be immediate action.
Applying the above to Don Giovanni gives us an opportunity to see the latter in its true classic validity. Don Giovanni is the hero in the opera, the main interest centres on him. But that’s not all: he bestows interest on all the other figures. This is not to be understood, however, in a merely external sense; the very secret of this opera is that its hero is also the force animating the other characters. Don Giovanni’s own life is the principle of life in them. His passion sets in motion the passions of the others; it resonates everywhere, it resonates in and sustains the Commendatore’s earnest, Elvira’s anger, Anna’s hate, Ottavio’s self-importance, Zerlina’s anxiety, Masetto’s indignation and Leporello’s confusion. As the eponymous hero, as a hero in general, he gives the piece its name. But he is more; he is, if I may so put it, the common denominator. Compared with his, the existences of all the others are merely derivative. If we require of an opera that its unity be a tonality of mood, we see readily that no more perfect project can be conceived for an opera than Don Giovanni. For, in relation to the forces in the opera, this tonality might have been a third force sustaining these. I could mention The White Lady as a case in point,40 but, in relation to opera, a unity of that kind brings in a further lyrical aspect. In Don Giovanni the tonality is nothing other than the primitive power of the opera itself; this is Don Giovanni, but again, just because he is not character but essentially life, he is absolutely musical. The other figures in the opera are not characters either but essentially passions posited through Don Giovanni and are, to that extent again, musical. For as Don Giovanni entwines them all, so do they twine themselves round Don Giovanni; they are the outward consequences constantly posited by his life. It is this absolute centrality of the musical life of Don Giovanni which makes this opera exert a power of illusion as no other, makes its musical life transport one into the life of the play. Because of the omnipresence of the musical in this opera, one may enjoy any snatch of it and be instantly transported. One may enter in the middle of the action and instantly be at its centre, because this centre, which is Don Giovanni’s life, is everywhere.
Well-attested experience tells us that it is not pleasant to strain two senses at once, and it is often distracting to have to make much use of the eyes when the ears are already occupied. We have a tendency, therefore, to close our eyes when listening to music. This is true of all music to some extent, of Don Giovanni in a higher sense. As soon as the eyes are engaged the impression gets confused, for the dramatic unity afforded to the eye is entirely subordinate and defective compared with the musical unity which is heard simultaneously. My own experience has convinced me of this. I have sat close up, I have sat further and further away, I have resorted to an out-of-the-way corner of the theatre where I could hide myself totally in this music. The better I understood it or believed I understood it, the further I moved away from it, not from coolness but from love, for it wants to be understood at a distance. For my own life there has been something strangely puzzling about this. There have been times when I would have given anything for a ticket; now I needn’t spend even a penny for one. I stand outside in the corridor; I lean up against the partition separating me from the auditorium and then the impression is most powerful; it is a world by itself, apart from me, I can see nothing, but am near enough to hear and yet so infinitely far away.
Since the main figures in the opera do not need to be so interpenetrated with reflection that, as characters, they are transparent, it also follows, as was stressed in the foregoing, that the situation cannot be completely developed or full-blown but must to some extent be sustained by a mood. The same applies to the action in an opera. What is called an action in a stricter sense, a deed undertaken in the consciousness of a purpose, cannot find expression in music, but only what one might call immediate action. Now both of these are true of Don Giovanni. The action is immediate action; here I must refer to the foregoing where I explained in what sense Don Giovanni is a seducer. Because the action is immediate action, it is also quite proper that irony should be so prevalent in this piece, for irony is and remains the taskmaster of the immediate life. Thus, to cite just one example, the return of the Commendatore is a monstrous irony; for Don Giovanni can overcome every obstacle but we all know you cannot kill a ghost. The situation is sustained throughout by the mood. I must remind you in this connection of Don Giovanni’s significance for the piece as a whole, and of the relative existence of the other figures in relation to him. I will indicate what I mean by looking at a single situation more closely.
For this purpose, I choose Elvira’s first aria. The orchestra performs the prelude, Elvira enters. The passion raging in her breast must have air, and her song helps her find it. This, however, would be far too lyrical really to form a situation; her aria would be like a monologue in a play. The difference would only be that the monologue in effect renders the universal individually, the aria the individual universally. […] In the background we see Don Giovanni and Leporello in tense expectation of the approach of the lady they have already seen in the window. Now if this was a play, the situation would not consist in Elvira’s standing in the foreground with Don Juan in the background, it would consist in the unexpected encounter. Interest would hinge upon how Don Giovanni was going to get out of it. The encounter has its importance in the opera too, but a very subordinate one. The encounter is there to be seen, the musical situation to be heard. The unity in the situation is then the blending of voices in which Elvira and Don Giovanni are heard together. It is therefore also perfectly proper for Don Giovanni to stay as far in the background as possible; for he should not be seen, not only by Elvira but even by the audience. Elvira’s aria begins. Her passion I know no way of describing other than as love’s hatred, a mingled, but full-bodied, resonant passion. Her inmost being is stirred by turbulent emotions, she has found air, for a moment she grows faint as all passionate outbreaks enervate; there follows a pause in the music. But the turbulence in her inmost being is sufficient to show that her passion has not yet found expression enough, the diaphragm of wrath must vibrate still more intensely. But what can call forth this agitation, what incitement? There can be but one thing – Don Giovanni’s mockery. Mozart has therefore made use of this pause in the music – would that I were a Greek, for then I would say, quite divinely – to fling in Don Giovanni’s jeering laughter. Now passion blazes stronger, rages even more violently within her and bursts forth in sound. Once again it repeats itself; then her inmost soul trembles, and wrath and pain pour forth like a stream of lava in the celebrated run with which the aria ends.
Here then we see what I mean when I say that Don Giovanni resonates in Elvira, that it is no mere phrase-making on my part. The spectator is not meant to see Don Giovanni, is not meant to see him together with Elvira, in the unity of the situation; he is meant to hear him inside Elvira, coming out of Elvira, for although it is Don Giovanni singing, the way he sings is such that the more developed the spectator’s ear the more it sounds as though it was coming from Elvira herself. As love fashions its object, so too does indignation. She is obsessed with Don Giovanni. That pause and Don Giovanni’s voice make the situation dramatic, but what makes it musical is the unity in Elvira’s passion, in which Don Giovanni resonates while it is nevertheless through him that her passion is posited. Musically conceived, the situation is matchless. But if Don Giovanni is a character and Elvira equally so, then it is a failure and a mistake to let Elvira unburden herself in the foreground while Don Giovanni jeers in the background, for that requires me to hear them together yet without my being given the means to do so, quite apart from their both being characters who could not possibly harmonize in that way. If they are characters, then it is the encounter which forms the situation.
It was remarked above that although opera does not call for the same dramatic urgency, the mounting acceleration of events, as drama, the situation can very well expand just a little. Yet this must not degenerate into perpetual stoppage. As an instance of the happy medium I can single out the situation just discussed, though not as if that were the only one in Don Giovanni, or the most perfect – quite the contrary, they are all like this and all perfect – but because the reader will remember this one best. And yet here I am coming to a touchy point; for I admit that there are two arias that must go, which, however perfect they may be in themselves, have nevertheless an obstructive, retarding effect. I would gladly make a secret of this but there is no help for it now, the truth must out. If these are removed, all the rest is just as perfect. One of them is Ottavio’s, the other Anna’s; they are both more like concert pieces than dramatic music, just as Ottavio and Anna are far too insignificant figures to justify holding up the action. When they are removed the musical-dramatic pace of the rest of the opera is perfect, perfect as no other.
It would be well worth the trouble of going through each individual situation individually, not to accompany it with an exclamation mark but to show its significance, its validity as a musical situation. That, however, is beyond the scope of the present little inquiry. What is especially important here is to highlight the Cenerality of Don Giovanni within the opera as a whole. Something similar recurs with regard to the individual situations.
I shall throw a little more light on this centrality of Don Giovanni in the opera by considering the other figures in the work in their relation to him. As in a solar system, the dark bodies receiving their light from a sun in the centre are always only half illuminated, on the side facing the sun, so too with the figures in this piece. Only that aspect of life, that side, which is turned towards Don Giovanni is illuminated; otherwise these figures are dim and obscure. This must not be understood in the restricted sense as though each of them were one or another abstract passion – as though Anna, for example, were hate, Zerlina frivolity. Here, least of all, is the place for examples of such poor taste. The passion in the individual is concrete, though concrete in itself, not concrete in the figure; or, to express myself more distinctly, everything else in the figure is swallowed up by that passion. That is absolutely right, because here we are dealing with an opera. This obscurity, this partly sympathetic, partly antipathetic mysterious communication with Don Giovanni makes all of them musical, and has the effect of making the whole opera consonate in Don Giovanni. The only figure in the piece who seems an exception is, naturally, the Commendatore; but that too is why it is so wisely planned as to have him He to some extent outside the piece, or circumscribe it; the more the Commendatore was brought to the fore, the more the opera would cease to be absolutely musical. So he is always kept in the background and as indistinct as possible. The Commendatore is the powerful antecedent and the fearless consequent between which lives Don Giovanni’s middle premiss, but the rich content of this middle premiss is the substance of the opera. The Commendatore appears only twice. The first time it is night, it is at the back of the stage, we cannot see him but we hear him fall to Don Giovanni’s sword. His gravity, made all the more strongly apparent by Don Giovanni’s parodying mockery, is something Mozart has already splendidly expressed in the music; already his seriousness is too profound to be that of a human being; he is spirit even before he dies. The second time it is as spirit that he appears, and the thundering of heaven resounds in his earnest, solemn voice, but as he himself is transfigured, so his voice is transformed into something more than human; he speaks no more, he judges.
Next to Don Giovanni the most important character in the piece is clearly Leporello. His relation to his master is explicable precisely through the music; without music it is inexplicable. If Don Giovanni were a reflective individual, Leporello would become almost a greater scoundrel than him; then it would be inexplicable how Don Giovanni was able to exercise so much power over him, the only motivation left being his ability to pay him better than anyone else – a motivation that even Molière seems not to resort to, since he has his Don Juan financially embarrassed. If, on the other hand, we continue to identify Don Giovanni as the life of immediacy, we easily grasp how he can exercise a decisive influence upon Leporello, that the latter assimilates him so completely that he almost becomes one of Don Giovanni’s functioning parts. In a sense Leporello comes nearer to being consciously personal than Don Giovanni, yet to be that he would have to be clear about his relation to the latter; but that he cannot manage, he is unable to break the spell. Here too it is the case that whenever Leporello is given spoken lines he has to be transparent to us. Even in Leporello’s relation to Don Giovanni there is something erotic, a power with which he is captivated against his will; but in this ambiguity he is musical and Don Giovanni constantly resonates through him. I shall offer an example later to show that this is no mere phrase-making on my part.
With the exception of the Commendatore, everyone is in some kind of erotic relationship to Don Giovanni. Over the Commendatore he cannot exercise any power, for he is consciousness. The others are in his power: Elvira loves him, which puts her in his power; Anna hates him, which puts her in his power; Zerlina fears him, which puts her in his power; Ottavio and Masetto go along with him for the sake of brotherhood-in-law, for the ties of blood are tender.
If I look back now for a moment upon what has been expounded, the reader will perhaps see how, here again, the matter has been explicated from many sides: what relation the Don Juan idea bears to the musical, how this relation is constitutive of the whole opera, how this is repeated in the individual parts. I could gladly stop at this point, but for the sake of even greater completeness I shall shed light on the matter by examining some individual pieces. The choice will not be arbitrary. I take the overture, which really lays down for us, in a tightly concentrated form, the tonality of the opera’s mood. Next I take the most epic and the most lyrical moments in the work, in order to show how the perfection of the opera is preserved, the musical drama maintained, even at its extremes, and how Don Giovanni sustains the opera musically.
This is not the place for a general account of the part played by the overture in opera. All we can single out here is the circumstance that the fact that an opera needs an overture is enough to show the preponderance of the lyrical, and that the effect thus aimed at is the evocation of a mood, which is something drama cannot take upon itself, since there everything must be transparent. It is appropriate, therefore, that the overture be composed last, so that the artist himself can be properly permeated with the music. So the overture generally affords an opportunity to gain a deep insight into the composer’s soul and its relation to his music. If he hasn’t succeeded in grasping its centre, if he has no deeper rapport with the basic mood in the opera, this will betray itself unmistakably in the overture; it will then be a random compilation of the salient points based on the association of ideas, but not a totality containing, as it really should, the most profound illumination of the music’s content. An overture of that kind is therefore as a rule also entirely arbitrary; it can be as long or as short as it likes, and the collative element, the element of continuity, since it is only an association of ideas, can be made to spin out as long as may be. To inferior composers the overture is therefore often a dangerous temptation, for they are led to plagiarize themselves, pick from their own pockets, something that causes much confusion. While clearly the content of the overture should not be the same as the opera’s, neither, of course, should it be anything absolutely different. Its content should be the same but in some other way. It should contain what is central to the piece so that this can seize the listener with all its might.
In this respect, the ever-admired overture to Don Giovanni is and will remain a perfect masterpiece, so that if no other proof were afforded of this opera’s classic status, it would suffice to single out this fact alone, namely the inconceivability of the one who holds the centre not also holding the periphery. This overture is no mere fabric of themes, it is not a labyrinthine hotchpotch of associations; it is concise, resolute, powerfully structured; and above all it is impregnated with the essence of the whole opera. It is powerful as the thought of a god, stirring as the life of a world, trembling in its earnest, quivering in its passion, crushing in its terrible anger, inspiring in its zestful joy; it is sepulchral in its judgement, strident in its lust; it is unhurriedly solemn in its imposing dignity; it is stirring, shimmering, dancing in its joy. And it has not achieved this by sucking the blood of the opera; quite the contrary, it is prophetic in its relation to the latter. In the overture, the entire compass of the music unfolds; it is as though, with a few mighty wing-beats, it hovered over itself, hovered over the place where it is to alight. It is a contest, but a contest in the higher regions of the air. To someone hearing the overture after making closer acquaintance with the opera, it might perhaps seem as if he had found his way into the hidden workshop where the forces he has come to know in the opera display their primal energy, where they vie with one another with all their might. Yet the struggle is too unequal, one power is already the victor before the battle, it flees and gets out of the way, but this flight is precisely its passion, its burning unrest in its brief moment of delight, the quickening pulse in its passionate heat. It thereby sets the other power in motion and sweeps it along with it. This latter, which seemed at first so unshakeably firm as to be almost immoveable, must now be off, and soon the movement becomes so fast that it seems like a real contest. To express more of this is an impossible task; all one can do here is listen to the music, for the contest is not one of words but a raging of the elements. Except that I must draw attention to what was made clear earlier, that the opera’s focus is Don Giovanni, not Don Giovanni and the Commendatore. This is already evident in the overture. Mozart seems to have carefully constructed it in such a way that the deep voice which resonates at the beginning grows gradually weaker and weaker, almost loses, as it were, its majestic bearing, has to hurry to be able to keep up with the demonic haste which eludes it yet almost gains the power to degrade it by dragging it, in the brevity of an instant, into a race for a wager. With this, the transition to the opera itself gradually takes form. Consequently, one must conceive the finale in close relation to the first part of the overture. In the finale the gravity has once more come to itself, while in the course of the overture it is as though it were outside itself. There is no question now of running a race with passion; earnest has returned and has thus cut off every avenue to a new competition.
So, while in one sense independent, the overture is to be regarded in another sense as preliminary to the opera. I have tried in the foregoing to remind the reader of this by refreshing his memory of the progressive diminutions in which the one power approaches the beginning of the opera. Similarly when one observes the other power; it grows progressively larger. It starts in the overture, it grows and increases. What is particularly admirable is the way in which this, its beginning, is expressed. We hear it intimated so faintly, so mysteriously; we hear it but it is gone so quickly, so what we get is exactly the impression of having heard something we haven’t heard. It takes an attentive, an erotic ear to catch the first hint given in the overture of the light play of this desire, which is later expressed so richly in all its extravagant abundance. I cannot say exactly to the dot where this place is because I am not expert in music, but then I am writing only for those in love, and they will surely understand me, some of them better than I understand myself. Still, I am content with my appointed lot, with this enigmatic infatuation, and although I usually thank the gods that I was born a man and not a woman, Mozart’s music has taught me that it is beautiful and restorative and rich to love like a woman.
I am no friend of metaphors; modern literature has given me a great aversion to them; it has come almost to the point where, every time I come upon a metaphor, I am seized by an involuntary fear that its true purpose is to conceal an obscurity in the thought. I shall therefore not venture upon an indiscreet or fruitless attempt to translate the overture’s energetic and terse brevity into long-winded and platitudinous figures of speech; I single out just one point in the overture, and will employ a metaphor to call the reader’s attention to it, that being the only means I have for putting myself in touch with him. This point is naturally none other than Don Giovanni’s first outburst, the premonition of him, of the power with which he later emerges. The overture begins with distinct, deep, serious, uniform tones; then for the first time, infinitely far away, we hear a hint which nevertheless, as though it had come too early, is instantly recalled, until later, again and again, bolder and bolder, louder and louder, one hears that voice which first slyly and coyly, and yet as though anxiously, gained access but could not force its way through. Thus sometimes in nature one sees the horizon heavy and lowering. Too heavy to support itself, it rests upon the earth and hides everything in its dark night; distinct hollow sounds are heard, yet not in movement but like a deep rumbling within itself – then one sees at the furthest bounds of the heavens, far on the horizon, a flash; swiftly it runs along the earth and is gone in the same instant. But soon it returns, it grows stronger; for a moment it lights up the whole heaven with its flame, the next instant the horizon seems darker than ever; but swifter, even more fiery it blazes up; it is as if the darkness itself had lost its calm and was getting into motion. As the eye suspects in this first flash a conflagration, so the ear in that dying strain of the violin stroke has a presentiment of all the passion. There is an apprehension in that flash, it is as if in the deep darkness it were born in dread – such is Don Giovanni’s life. There is a dread in him, but this dread is his energy. It is not a subjectively reflected dread, it is a substantial dread. In the overture we do not have – what we commonly say without realizing what we say – despair. Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is the full might of sensuality, which is born in dread, and Don Giovanni is himself this dread, but this dread is precisely the demonic joy of life. After Mozart has brought him thus into existence, Don Giovanni’s life evolves for us in the dancing tones of the violin in which he lightly, casually, hastens forward over the abyss. As when one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths, that is how Don Giovanni dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.
But if, as indicated above, the overture can be considered a preliminary to the opera, if in the overture one climbs down from these higher regions, the question is where best in the opera to alight, or how to get the opera to start. Here Mozart has seen the only right way: to begin with Leporello. It might seem that there was no great merit in this, inasmuch as practically all adaptations of the Don Juan story begin with a monologue by Sganarelle. However, there is a big difference, and here again one has an opportunity to admire Mozart’s mastery. He has placed the first servant-aria in immediate conjunction with the overture. This is a rare practice; here it is entirely appropriate, and it casts a new light on the overture’s construction. The overture is trying to set itself down, to find a foothold in the action on the stage. The Commendatore and Don Giovanni have already been heard in the overture; next to them Leporello is the most important figure. He, however, cannot be raised up into that battle in the airy regions, and yet he is more closely involved than any other. So the action begins with him, in such a way that he is linked immediately with the overture. It is quite correct, then, to count Leporello’s first aria as belonging to the overture. This aria corresponds to the not-unnoted Sganarelle monologue in Molière. We shall examine this situation a little more closely. Sganarelle’s monologue is far from unwitty. […] On the other hand, the situation is defective. […] I say this not to find fault with Molière but to show Mozart’s merit. A monologue is always more or less of an interruption in the drama, and when, for effect, the writer tries to do this through the humour in the monologue itself, instead of through the character, then he has irrevocably condemned himself and abandoned the dramatic interest. In the opera it is otherwise. Here the situation is absolutely musical. I have previously drawn attention to the difference between a dramatic and a dramatic-musical situation. In drama no idle talk is tolerated, what are needed are action and situation. In opera the situation contains a breathing space. But then what makes it a musical situation? It has been stressed earlier that Leporello is a musical figure, and yet it is not he who sustains the situation. If it were, his aria would be analogous to Sganarelle’s monologue, even though that would show equally that a quasi-situation of this kind works better in opera than in drama. What makes the situation musical is Don Giovanni, who is in the house. The crux of the situation lies not in Leporello who draws near us, but in Don Giovanni whom we do not see – but whom we hear. Now one might well object that we do not in fact hear Don Giovanni. To this I would reply: we do indeed hear him, for he resounds in Leporello. To this end I shall draw attention to the transitions (voi star dentro colla bella),41 where Leporello is obviously reproducing Don Giovanni. But even if this were not so, the set-up of the situation is such that we get Don Giovanni anyway, forgetting Leporello who is outside the house because of Don Giovanni who is inside it. Altogether, Mozart with true genius has let Leporello reproduce Don Giovanni, thus achieving two things: the musical effect that wherever Leporello is alone we hear Don Giovanni; and the parodying effect that when Don Giovanni is there too, we hear Leporello rehearse him and thereby unconsciously parody him. As an example I would mention the close of the ball.
If anyone asks what is the most epic moment in the opera, the answer is unquestionably Leporello’s second aria, the list. We have already stressed earlier, by comparing this aria with the corresponding monologue in Molière, the absolute importance of the music, and how, by letting us hear Don Giovanni, letting us hear the variations in him, the music produces an effect of which the spoken word or the dialogue is incapable. Here it is important to emphasize both the situation and its musical aspect. If we now look at the stage, the scenic ensemble consists of Leporello, Elvira and the faithful servant. The faithless lover, on the other hand, is not there, for, as Leporello fittingly puts it, ‘he is off’. This is a virtuosity possessed by Don Giovanni, he is there and then – he is off, and he leaves the scene as conveniently (that is, for himself) as a Jeronimus arrives upon it.42 Now, since it is obvious he is not there, it may seem strange that I mention him and bring him in a sense into the situation. But, on second thoughts, we may perhaps see that this is just as it should be, and see in it an example of how literally we must take Don Giovanni’s omnipresence in the opera. For one could hardly give a more striking indication of this than by drawing attention to the fact that he is there even when he is away. But let him be off now, all the same, so that we can see later in what sense he is present. We look instead at the three figures on the stage. Elvira’s presence naturally contributes to forming a situation, for it would not do to have Leporello unroll the list just to kill time. But the position she is in also contributes to making the situation a painful one. The mockery occasionally made of Elvira’s love is undeniably close on cruel. Thus in the second act where, at the decisive moment, when Ottavio has finally got the courage in his heart and the sword from its scabbard to slay Don Giovanni, she throws herself between them and discovers that it is not Don Giovanni but Leporello, a difference Mozart has indicated so strikingly with a kind of whimpering bleat. Thus in the situation we are examining there is something painful too, that she should be present to learn that in Spain the number stands at 1,003; what is more, in the German version she is told indeed that she is one of them. This is a German improvement as foolishly indecent as the German translation itself is no less foolishly, ridiculously decent and a total failure. It is to Elvira that Leporello gives an epic survey of his master’s life, and one cannot deny that it is entirely proper that Leporello should recite it and Elvira listen, for they are both exceedingly interested. Therefore, as we constantly ‘hear’ Don Giovanni throughout the entire aria, so too in places we ‘hear’ Elvira, who is now visible on the stage as an exemplary witness, not because of some accidental merit on her part, but because, since the method remains essentially the same, one example does for all.
If Leporello were a character or person permeated by reflection, it would be hard to imagine such a monologue, but it is just because he is a musical figure, who is submerged in Don Giovanni, that this aria has so much meaning. It is a reproduction of Don Giovanni’s whole life. Leporello is the epic narrator. Though such a one should indeed not be cold or indifferent to what he tells, he ought to be able nevertheless to maintain an objective attitude towards it. This is not the case with Leporello. He is totally diverted by the life he describes, he forgets himself in Don Giovanni. So here I have another example of what it means to say that Don Giovanni resonates everywhere. The situation therefore consists not in Leporello and Elvira’s preoccupation with Don Giovanni, but in the mood sustaining the whole, in Don Giovanni’s invisible, spiritual presence. To give a more detailed account of how this aria develops, of how it begins peacefully, with little agitation, but becomes more and more inflamed as Don Giovanni’s life resounds increasingly within it; of how Leporello is more and more distracted by it, wafted away in and rocked by these erotic breezes; of the nuances it contains as the differentiations of womanhood that come within Don Giovanni’s scope become audible in it – for here is not the place.
If anyone asks what is the most lyrical moment in the opera, the answer might be more doubtful; while on the other hand it can hardly be open to doubt that Don Giovanni must be conceded the most lyrical moment, and that it would be a breach of dramatic ranking were it granted to a minor character to engage our attention in this way. Mozart, too, has realized this. The choice is thus considerably restricted, and on closer inspection the only possibilities are either the banquet in the first part of the grand finale or the familiar champagne aria. As far as the banquet scene is concerned, this may indeed be regarded as a lyrical moment; the feast’s intoxicating cordials, the foaming wine, the festive strains of distant music, everything unites to intensify Don Giovanni’s mood, as his own festive gaiety throws a heightened glow over all the enjoyment, an enjoyment so powerful in its effect that even Leporello is transfigured in this rich moment which is the last smile of gladness, the last farewell to pleasure. On the other hand, it is more of a situation than a sheerly lyrical moment. This, of course, is not because there is eating and drinking on stage, for that in itself is very inadequate in terms of a situation. The situation consists in Don Giovanni’s being forced out to life’s furthest point. Pursued by the whole world, this victorious Don Giovanni now has nowhere to stay except a small secluded room. It is at the extreme tip of life’s see-saw that, once again, for lack of lusty companionship, he excites every lust of life in his own breast. If Don Giovanni were a drama, then this inner unrest would have to be made as brief as possible. In the opera, on the other hand, it is proper that it is maintained, glorified by every possible exuberance, which only sounds the wilder because, for the spectators, it reverberates in the abyss over which Don Giovanni is hovering.
It is otherwise with the champagne aria. One looks here in vain, I believe, for a dramatic situation. But it has all the more significance as a lyrical effusion. Don Giovanni is wearied of the many intersecting intrigues; on the other hand he is by no means spent, his soul is still as vigorous as ever, he has no need of convivial society, to see and hear the foaming of the wine or to fortify himself with it; the inner vitality bursts forth in him stronger and richer than ever. Mozart constantly interprets him ideally, as life, as power, but ideally in opposition to a reality; here he is as though ideally intoxicated in himself. If all the girls in the world surrounded him at this moment he would be no danger to them, for it is as though he is too strong to want to turn their heads, even reality’s most variegated enjoyment is too little for him compared with what he enjoys in himself. Here is the clear indication of what it means to say that the essence of Don Giovanni is music. He dissolves before us into music, he dilates into a world of tones. This has been called the champagne aria, and that is undeniably very apt. But what is especially to be noted is that it stands in no accidental relation to Don Giovanni. This is his life, foaming like champagne. And just as the bubbles in this wine, while it seethes in inner heat, sonorous in its own melody, rise and continue to rise, so the desire for enjoyment resounds in the elemental boiling that is his life. What gives this aria dramatic significance is not the situation, but the fact that here the keynote of the opera sounds and resounds in itself.
PLATITUDINOUS POSTLUDE
Assuming what has been elaborated here is correct, I return once again to my favourite theme, that among all classic works Mozart’s Don Ciovanni stands highest. I shall rejoice once again over Mozart’s good luck, a fortune which is truly enviable, both in itself and because it brings fortune to all those who only moderately grasp his good fortune. For myself, at least, I feel indescribably fortunate in having even remotely understood Mozart, and in having gained some intimations of his good fortune. How much more so, then, those who have perfectly understood him, how much more fortunate must they feel with that fortunate man.