Fun Facts about Mozart's Don Giovanni

Oct 3, 2024

Think you know everything about Mozart's masterpiece?

Enjoy some tid-bits and fast facts about the infamous Don Giovanni.

Don Giovanni is notable for being the first opera to incorporate the trombone in its orchestration.

The character of Don Giovanni bears a striking resemblance to the infamous Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who was living in Prague during the opera’s premiere. Some speculate that Casanova’s notorious lifestyle may have influenced the portrayal of Don Giovanni.

The opera was originally scheduled to premiere on October 15, 1787, in Prague but was postponed to October 29 due to Mozart needing more time to perfect the composition.

Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist for Don Giovanni, was also a priest, a professional gambler, a teacher, and eventually became the first Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia University in the United States.

The overture to Don Giovanni was reportedly composed the night before its premiere. According to accounts, Mozart wrote it in a single evening, with his wife keeping him awake by telling him stories.

Don Giovanni was commissioned by the Prague National Theatre following the success of The Marriage of Figaro.

The tale of Don Juan has roots in Spanish literature and had been circulating in various forms for centuries before Mozart and Da Ponte adapted it for the opera.

In the original productions of Don Giovanni, the same singer often played both the roles of the Commendatore (the statue) and Masetto, the peasant.

Mozart superfan, Søren Kierkegaard, singled out Don Giovanni as the “one work alone of [Mozart’s] which makes him…absolutely immortal.”

George Bernard Shaw taught himself piano by playing the overture to Don Giovanni as he wanted to “start with something I knew well enough so that I would at least know whether the notes were right or wrong.”

Mozart and Da Ponte considered Don Giovanni a “Dramma giocoso” – a drama with jokes.

Don Giovanni was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2nd favorite opera, the first being The Marriage of Figaro.

In the final scene of the opera, a band begins to play ‘Non più andrai’ from The Marriage of Figaro, of which Leporello says "I know this piece only too well." Leporello knew what he was talking about. The singer playing Leporello at the Prague premiere had also played Figaro in its Prague premiere.

W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, who wrote the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, translated Don Giovanni into English in 1961.

The 1979 film Don Giovanni features one character who does not appear in the original source material, a Valet in Black, a metaphysical representation of Don Giovanni's soul.

Mozart finished the Overture to Don Giovanni the night before opening, in which the orchestra sight read it at the first performance.

There is a conspiracy theory that Da Ponte stole much of the text from the opera Il Convitato di Pietra (The Stone Guest) by Bertati and Gazzaniga, a version of the Don Juan story written around the same time.

Three different operas of the Don Juan story premiered in 1787 - Don Giovanni Tenorio by the Italian composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga, Don Giovanni by Francesco Gardi's, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The original production did not end with Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell, but ended with the other characters entering and learning what happened from Leporello, leading them to address the audience with the moral of the story - "This is the fate of an immoral man." Today some productions include this ending.

Legend says that the young bass, and original Don Giovanni, Luigi Bassi, who was 22, complained about Mozart not writing him enough music, so he insisted on edits being made to give him more to sing.

The gossip around Don Giovanni stipulated that Mozart flirted with all three sopranos in the original production, and was said to have given his “flavor of the week” more music to sing.

Don Giovanni uses a mandolin in the orchestra.

The real-life Casanova was known to be close friends with Da Ponte, and rumored to have been a collaborator with him on the libretto. He was also at the premiere of the opera.

The US premiere of Don Giovanni was in 1826, and staged by the librettist, Da Ponte, himself.

In 2000, the film Don Giovanni Unmasked created a reduced version of the opera in which Don Giovanni is really Leporello’s alter-ego and they are the same person.

Don Giovanni was included in the first season of the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. It was also included in the Met’s second season, but sung in German.

Don Giovanni quickly became popular in Germany, but, as it did so, it took on many of the bawdy folk traditions of the original story. New scenes were interpolated, names were changed, and the story was turned into a farce.

The music of Don Giovanni, as it is normally heard today, is an amalgam of the two different versions of the work that Mozart and Da Ponte made for Prague and then Vienna. The result is something which is often musically and dramatically quite different from anything that they themselves ever produced. For the second production, the one in Vienna, Mozart and Da Ponte tailored the opera to suit a new cast.

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