Don Giovanni's Reasons: Thoughts on a masterpiece

A collection of seven chapters on Lorenzo Da Ponte‘s Memorie and his librettos L’arbore di Diana (for Vicente Martín y Soler) and Don Giovanni (for Mozart), the texts are studied as radical works of the Late Enlightenment inspired by Rousseau’s socio-political thinking.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 218 pages
Publication date: 04 May 2021
Publisher: Peter Lang AG

Despite being the most analyzed opera of all time, Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) has received relatively little attention as a work of poetry in its own right. The author contends that the libretto, rather than perpetuating the conservative religious morality inherent in the Don Juan story, challenges our cultural myth of human sexuality through a critical rewriting. By employing a combination of poetic close reading techniques and approaches borrowed from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, legal history, intellectual history, literary history, art history, and theatrical performance analysis, the author delves into the Don Giovanni libretto as a radical political text of the Late Enlightenment. Remarkably, this work retains its power to provoke and engage contemporary audiences with its thought-provoking questions about compassion, seduction, violence, individual autonomy, and responsibility. These issues remain deeply relevant to us today.

Weight: 290g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783631817964
Edition number: New ed