I. [OK, what exactly is opera? This isn't the simplest definition but it is certainly provocative.]

Opera as drama. What are we to comprehend as drama? There have been many general answers, all necessarily partial I might start by mentioning briefly some things that drama is not, and then follow up an obvious analogy. Drama is not, exclusively, a matter of the effective deployment of plot. Skillfully conntrived situations, clever exits and entrances, and violent coups de théâtre [theaterical strokes] do not compose the soul of drama. Neither does strict naturalism in character, locale, or detail; "imitation of an action" does not mean photographic reproduction. Yet when an opera is praised as dramatic, the judgement generally seems to be based on some such limited view. What is meant is little more than "theatrical" or, rather, "effective according to the principles of the late nineteenth-century theater." Tosca is "dramatic"; not a very subtle piece, perhaps, or a gracious one musically, but at least "dramatic"-and so it holds the stage.

It should hardly be necessary to observe that other dramatic traditions exist besides the so-called Naturalism of the nineteenth century, and that they have differed as widely in technique as in range of expression. Dramatic criticism is concerned with Aeschylus and Euripides, the medieval stage, Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans, Racine, Goethe and Pirandello, Lorca, and Eliot, as well as with Ibsen, Shaw, and their less serious followers. A contemporary account of drama has to rationalize some appreciation of the particular powers and procedures of many very different dramatists. (Two modern classics of dramatic criticism, The Idea by Francis Fergusson and The Playwright as Thinker by Eric Bentley, provide an important place for Wagner too.) Drama in its great periods has been variously conventionalized and variously artificial; the slice of life and the well-made plot are by no means essential. Indeed Naturalism, whatever its merits, is less useful to the understanding of opera than are most other modes of spoken drama.

Most of those others are poetic modes; this fact alone brings them closer to opera. The comparison with poetic drama can help us with the problem of dramma per musica [drama through music], as opera was called by the early Italians-drama through music, by means of music. The analogy should probably not be pressed too far, but fundamentally it is just: in each form, drama is articulated on its most serious level by an imaginative medium, poetry in the one case, music in the other. In his essay Poetry and Drama, T. S. Eliot put it as follows:

"It is a function of all art to give us some perception of an order in life, by imposing an order upon it. The painter works by selection, combination, and emphasis among the elements of the visible world; the musician, in the world of sound. It seems to me that beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action-the part of life which prose drama is wholly adequate to express--there is a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus; of feeling of which we are only aware in a kind of temporary detachment from action. There are great prose dramatists-such as Ibsen and Chekhov-who have at times done things of which I would not otherwise have sup-posed prose to be capable, but who seem to me, in spite of their success, to have been hampered in expression by writing in prose. This peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity. At such moments, we touch the border of those feelings which only music can express."

The function of dramatic poetry is to supply certain kinds of meaning to the drama, meanings that enrich immeasurably, and enrich dramatically, and that cannot be presented in any other way. What is essentially at issue is the response of the persons in the play to the elements of the action. In this area poetry can do more than prose discussion or the placement of actors into physical and psychological relationships. The particular aspect or weight of such relationships, of events and episodes, is determined by the quality of the verse; and in the largest sense the dramatic form is articulated by the poetry in conjunction with the plot structure. The same can be true of music.

As T.S. Eliot says, ". . . when Shakespeare, in one of his mature plays, introduces what might seem a purely poetic line or pas-sage, it never interrupts the action, or is out of character, but, on the contrary, in some mysterious way supports both action and character." More profoundly yet, an extended poetic pas-sage can critically determine the whole course of a drama by its quality of feeling. In such a case poetry becomes the vital element of the action. An example comes to mind (for a spe-cial purpose) from Othello: the entrance of Othello with the candle in the last scene, before he kills Desdemona. To say that he comes no longer as a jealous murderer, but in the role of judge, is merely to give the scenario of what Shakespeare projects by poetry:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again;
It needs must wither. I'll smell it on the tree.
He kisses her.

Imagery and poetic music combine to give a grave beauty to Othello's behavior. First, I think, by means of the heavy rhythm of the opening repetition, with the recurring soft as-sonant "is . . . cause" interrupted by the flow of the second line to its majestic halt at the slow, again assonant, spondee "chaste stars." A moment later the repetitions are resumed and developed, four-fold with echoing t's, and with a particularly beautiful intensification in the rhyming and weighting of "thy light." Second, the metaphors, homely and poignant-putting out a light, plucking a rose. The quiet syntax, imagery, and rhythm combine to create a gentleness, inevitability, and clear-eyed grandeur that no amount of prose or plotting could have matched. This is all brought out by the fine dramatic contrast with Othello's tone at his previous ap-pearance, all k's and p's and spitting rhythms; Desdemona was not a rose but a sweet-smelling weed, "a cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in" and many other complicated things. In turn, the soliloquy reflects forward to the great final speeches in which Othello seeks to summon up his former self-image. One's response to the play as a whole hinges on the feeling of this soliloquy, and on other elements of this sort.

The musician's ear responds to analogous elements in opera, wherein the imaginative articulation for the drama is provided by music. Consider the parallel scene in Verdi's Otello- it is not exactly parallel, of course, for Verdi wanted a different quality, and to get it altered the "scenario" (it was not the libretto that altered the quality). Otello enters making the de-cision, not already resolved; rather than the sobriety of tragic anticipation, Verdi wished to present love and fury tearing at Otello's soul. The scene begins on a celebrated note of menace, muted double-basses interrupting the ethereal close of Desdemona's Ave Maria. What defines it as much as the gro-tesque color and pitch is the key contrast, E thrust into AL The double-bass line becomes more mellow, and limps, punc-tuated by an urgent motive, at first bleak, then flaring up as Otello makes to scimitar Desdemona at once. A crying figure seems to restrain him; answering it, with an abrupt harmonic shift again, a dull-rooted melody grows out of the first notes of the double-bass line, harping on the minor sixth degree, F. This turns radiantly into the major sixth, and a beautiful phrase that we recognize with a flash of understanding: the climax of the love-duet of Act I, ardent, articulate, assured. But as Desdemona awakes to his kiss, this possibility is cut off by means of the most wonderful harmonic change of all, a turn from E to F minor which sounds suddenly the real note of tragedy.

One's response to the drama as a whole hinges on the feeling of this scene in its context. Very obviously so, in this case; for by means of the phrase associated with the kiss, Verdi directly links the scene backward to the early serenity of the first night in Cyprus in Act I, and forward to the opera's final moment:

"I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee. No way but this- Killing myself, to die upon a kiss."

When Otello stabs himself, the motive with the minor sixth is heard again, and there is new pathos now to its transfor-mation into the luminous music of the kiss. Nothing escapes Otello's consciousness; the F returns as a Phrygian cadence to the tonic key of E. Where Shakespeare recalls the past feel-ing, Verdi, by the force of musical recapitulation, actually recaptures it, and even intensifies it, by means of certain changes in detail. If Verdi's man does not achieve the new integration of nobility attempted by Shakespeare's, he does recover the fullness of his love, no inconsiderable dramatic feat. It is the music that sums up, forms, and refines.

In a verse play, those all-important feelings which make the difference between scenario and work of art are supplied by the poetry; in an opera, by the music. The speed and mental pliability of words give verse drama an intellectual brilliance impossible to opera, and indeed the luxuriance of detail presents a challenge to the poet, who has to organize it firmly to his central dramatic idea. Poetry is much more precise in the treatment of specific matters; narration, discussion, and subtleties of character development come naturally to verse drama, but have to be treated with circumspection in opera. Eliot's problem about "saying h6mely things without bathos" is much more severe for the opera composer.

But in spite of all the flexibility and clarity of poetry, even the most passionate of speeches exists on a level of emotional reserve that music automatically passes. Music can be im-mediate and simple in the presentation of emotional states or shades. In an opera, people can give themselves over to sen-sibility; in a play nobody ever quite stops thinking. Music is also a natural medium for the projecting of various kinds of mood and pageantry, and is so used in the spoken theater. As dramatic elements, these are often misused, but need not be. And in the larger sense of form, music has the clearer, stronger outlines. Recapitulations, cadences, transitions, interrelations, and modulations are devices that music has learned to handle most powerfully.

These and other differences surely exist, and account for the different forms developed for spoken and musical drama. But in spite of differences, I would emphasize again that the imaginative function of music in drama and that of poetry in drama are fundamentally the same. Each art has the final responsibility for the success of the drama, for it is within their capacity to define the response of characters to deeds and situations. Like poetry, music can reveal the quality of action, and thus determine dramatic form in the most serious sense.

In the following chapters, I shall develop this idea in reference to the great musical dramatists. They differ, perhaps, as widely as Shakespeare and Sophocles and Strindberg in their dramaturgies and in their personalities. But for all of them, opera was not a mere concert in costume, or a play with highlights and an overall mood supplied by music, but an art-form with its own consistency and intensity, and its own sphere of expression. Opera is a type of drama whose integral existence is determined from point to point and in the whole by musical articulation. Dramma per musica. Not only operatic theory, but also operatic achievement bears this out.

In formulating this view of opera, I certainly had no thought of claiming it as a novelty. It is the view that has kept operatic criticism alive for 350 years, and one that many people today probably hold-but lazily; few seem ready to go and meet it, think it through, and assume its consequences. At present, indeed, there seems to be more vigor in other attitudes, which go against opera as drama, either directly or insidiously.

The attitudes which concerned me in the 1950's, and which I tried to exemplify briefly from the work of prominent writers, still seem to me paradigmatic. Dramatic critics of a pronounced literary bent tend almost automatically to question the dramatic efficacy of any non-verbal artistic medium. They do not doubt that music in the last few hundred years has attained enough maturity to meet very stringent demands; they may be keen music-lovers. But they feel that because of a characteristic lack of detailed reference, music cannot qual-ify ideas and therefore cannot define drama in a meaningful way. Thus Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker:

". . .every dramaturgic practice that subordinates the words to any other medium has trivialized the drama without giving full reign to the medium that has become dominant. . . . Above all, music performs its dramatic functions very inadequately. Though Wagner and Richard Strauss have carried dramatic music to extraordinary lengths, they not only cannot, as the latter wished, give an exact musical description of a table-spoon, they cannot do anything at all with the even more baf-fling world of conceptual thought. They cannot construct the complex parallels and contraries of meaning which drama demands."

Now just what music can do is of course a famous aesthetic problem. According to the classic solution of the seventeenth century, music depicts "affects." But the twentieth tends rather to discern certain kinds of "meaning" in music, signif-icances impossible to define in words by their very nature, but precious and unique, and rooted unshakeably in human experience. Meaning cannot be restricted to words. If even ostensibly abstract instrumental music is thought to have meaning, the case is surely stronger with opera, where the specific conceptual reference is continuously supplied-by the libretto. Supplied as clearly as possible by the presenta-tion of situations and conflicts, and by the use of words in their "denotative" aspect. . .


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II. [Kerman talks about the way Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte viewed their protagonist.]

The libretto for Cosi fan tutte [Mozart's last comic opera] was too nearly perfect, in its soulless terms, for Mozart to deal with it properly in his. But the libretto for Don Giovanni left much to be desired-more than a composer could supply.

Now the critical attitude towards Don Giovanni has really changed as much as that toward Cosi fan tutte, though in just the opposite way. The Romantics worshipped it as a unique masterpiece, the only opera in which Mozart touched the daemonic roots of reality. >From E. T. A. Hoffmann and Kierkegaard [nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and religious thinker who argued that "truth is subjectivity"] to George Bernard Shaw [Irish playright and author, arguablythe greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare] and Richard Strauss [German Romantic composer], Don Giovanni has been idealized into a Faust or a superman, a shining knight of the ewig Weibliche [eternally feminine] if not the life-force itself. Only in the twentieth century has historical scholarship labored to interpret the opera as an ordinary farce with supernatural additions, clumsily grafted together and blessedly over-composed. The story was well known in opera buffa, and in-deed discredited, fit for the provinces.

If Da Ponte had not known that Mozart would be sure to spruce it up, he probably would never have touched it. The speed with which the piece had to be written explains certain of its crudities; Da Ponte was busy with two rather more fashionable composers, and had time only to expand an earlier libretto for Mozart. Since Don Giovanni was ordered for the city which loved Figaro, the authors set out to duplicate the winning features of that op-era. Once Dent has pointed it out, it is easy to see that Don Giovanni was originally laid out in the unusual four-act scheme of Figaro in order to include much action; that it ex-ploits the same social complex of masters and servants; that it has the same baritone preponderance and three women, having been designed for the same company; and that many arias echo numbers in the earlier opera. "I know this thing only too well!" says Leporello when Don Giovanni's little Tafelmusik ["table music," or informal music] band plays the latest hit from The Marriage of Figaro.

The dependence runs deeper. The success of Figaro [Mozart's opera of the previous year] in Prague must have gone to Mozart's head as well as to his heart, and Don Giovanni, written less than a year later, shows wonderful signs of his eagerness to develop his artistic gains. The Marriage of Figaro is remarkable for its graphic realism, which was unprecedented in opera buffa, and which Mozart must have stumbled upon under the influence of Beaumarchais's admirably realistic play. He applied and deepened the same quality of realism in Don Giovanni; but it was really rather thoughtless to have done so with this picaresque, supernatural, and not at all contemporary story. (Mozart never attempted such realism later, with Cosi fan tutte or The Magic Flute [Mozart's last opera].) Almost accidentally, we may suppose, he had discovered in Figaro the serious possibilities inherent in comic opera. His enthusiasm for pressing this discovery is everywhere apparent in Don Giovanni; he is ready to take anything and anybody seriously. To Mozart in this frame of mind, Donna Anna was a priceless gift from the poet: a full-fledged Metastasian heroine, but for once in a vivid, naturalistic context! Beside her, Idomeneo's Electra and Tito's Vitellia seem pale and orderly. Mozart, now intoxicated with the dramatic power of the ensemble, left the greatest of all examples of this quintessential form in Don Giovanni. He rejoiced in tours de force; one dazzling effect follows another; the drama gets out of hand. If Figaro was an extremely clever work, Don Giovanni is magnificently brash. Perhaps it had to be, with that hoary subject matter. Don Giovanni is Mozart's richest score, and the dearest of all his operas to the musician, as it is to the opera-going public today.

In Don Giovanni the sense of drama on the detailed level (though not on the largest level) is even more vivid than in Figaro. No praise is too high for the famous first-act introduction, where in a sudden rush of impression we see Leporello pacing the street, Donna Anna wrestling with Don Giovanni, the abrupt duel, and the Commendatore's death-and then the scurrilous chatter of Leporello again, in the recitative which interrupts the cadence. Three things are indelibly established: the tone of violence, speed, and passion; the clash-ing mode of comedy, thanks to Leporello; and the peculiar beauty which Mozart sounds in this opera, thanks to the moonlit trio as the Commendatore dies. Don Giovanni here does not exactly regret the death, but he is taken aback by its suddenness and unthinkingness. He might have wished for something else, if he ever took the trouble to think. Another perfect touch is the trio of the conspirators, with the woodwinds, inserted into the tense action of the first-act finale: a quite unrealistic fragment which has the effect of a chorus comment, and which deepens the solemnity of the intrigue. I have spoken previously of the extraordinary Ballroom Scene later in the finale, and of several of Elvira's ensembles. "La ci darem la mano" [a duet between the Don and one of his intended victims] one of the simplest-sounding things in the score, is also one of the most carefully calculated, with its gradual bringing-together of the two voices, Zerlina's nervous checks, and Don Giovanni's gently increasing pressure. Their next encounter, during that same finale, "Tra quest' arbori celata," is even more beautiful, especially in the larger dramatic context.

Mozart's developing sense of musical means for drama is illustrated by his reworking of one small detail from The Marriage of Figaro. In the sextet of Act II in Don Giovanni, the modulatory shock of the conspirators, when Leporello throws off his disguise and explains that they have not caught Don Giovanni after all, is parallel to, but even better managed than, the musical reaction of the court at the end of Figaro, when the Countess throws off her disguise. Yet we cannot help noting, at the same time, the triviality to which the device is turned, as compared with the situation in Figaro. Dramaturgical perfection is not the same thing as fine drama.

Can Da Ponte's libretto as a whole support Mozart's sense of drama, his graphic realism, his profundity of insight and expression? Certainly the libretto to Don Giovanni "works" on the large level; Da Ponte was an excellent theatrical craftsman, and his knowledge of dramatic rhythm did not desert him here. But on many levels the piece shows deficiencies more severe than any in Mozart's other great operas. The libretto is full of improbabilities: to cite only one of the first, furious Elvira stands patiently listening to a servant sing a long, insolent, suggestive aria about her betrayal. Whereas the improbabilities of Cosi fan tutte are carefully chosen and witty, those of Don Giovanni are fortuitous and clumsy; while Figaro, of course, does not show any improbabilities. It always takes a modicum of care to arrange arias in a libretto, and in Cosi fan tutte it is always elegantly done. In Figaro, four arias are inserted into Act IV stiffly enough, but though they strain our patience, they do not strain our credulity. The way in which the last act of Don Giovanni is distorted to provide arias for Anna and Elvira, however, can only be called dramatically cynical, whether they enhance characterization or not. And these faults in Don Giovanni are especially glaring in its context of passionate naturalism.

As far as characterization is concerned, Mozart's wonderful picture of the three women has always been rightly admired, if often wrongly interpreted: steely Donna Anna, innocent (yes, innocent) Zerlina, and especially Donna Elvira, the first of Mozart's developing heroines, a type more systematically worked out with Fiordiligi and Pamina. But rich personalities do not automatically make for true drama; the study of characterization was the primrose path of older dramatic criticism.

What is one to say of the mysterious Don himself? He is an unaware person for a Mozartian hero, though his charm, largesse, ingenuity, and reasonableness are not left in doubt. The singular fact is that until the end almost all of the action and musical expression goes to illuminate the people with whom he is involved, not Don Giovanni himself. This seems to me a dramatic mistake, and one that was fatally com-pounded when Da Ponte began to build the second act around Leporello. Even the scene in the graveyard, which cer-tainly should involve Don Giovanni and the Statue, turns out to be mostly about Leporello.

Like Faust and Peer Gynt, Don Juan goes through a series of loosely joined adventures. It was clever and dramatic of Da Ponte to have succeeded in relating them so well, but this very cleverness led him into an impasse which Marlowe and Ibsen avoided-the adventures assume more interest than the hero. To say that Don Giovanni's lack of involvement is precisely the strongest element of his personality is to argue ab vacuo [in a vacuum]; in opera we trust what is done most firmly by the music. The very blankness of Don Giovanni's characterization, indeed, must have been what especially attracted romantic critics. Their daydreams and idealizations could sprout and flourish in Mozart's relative void.

Finally, though, Leporello is pushed under the table as the Statue pulls Don Giovanni down to hell in the great finale. Mozart composed this con amore [with love]; another god sent opportunity to be serious and intense. The eighteenth century may have been used to treating Don Juan in terms of farce with supernatural additions, but under the influence of Mozart's setting of the catastrophe, we cannot shun its implications. Inherent in the legend is the conflict between the glamour and the irrevocability of sin. The opera merely enlarges this conflict-an expression of the "daemonic," or else a weakness in the central conception, according to taste. Up to the end, our sympathies have been enlisted for the hero in countless ways; then Mozart shows him damned in a scene whose terror sud-denly dominates the drama. As the action touches Don Giovanni at last, he rises magnificently to the occasion, fearless and true to himself in a crisis which is past pride. In what way, then, does he deserve his damnation? what does Mozart think of his doom? what does Don Giovanni himself think-for presumably by this time he will be open to some introspec-tion? Honest and subtle equivocation would be a dramatic possibility, but instead we have accidental and unformed ambiguity. Either Da Ponte was unaware of all the questions that he conjured up along with his little red devils, or else he deliberately pushed the questions under. Certainly the epilogue answers none of them; it only goes to show how drab life is without the Don.

It is no use speculating on what might have been. Mozart, who transformed other dramas, might have transformed this one, but Da Ponte is mostly responsible for the weakness. After all, nobody believes in ghosts and devils, least of all Don Giovanni; such things can assuredly be put on the stage, but only on the strict condition that the convention and the atti-tude are clearly established. This is what everyone else has done who has dealt with Don Juan or any of his dramatic brothers. But Da Ponte failed to rationalize the action. One rather suspects that he lacked the intellectual force to cope with it.

Kierkegaard first spoke of a magic "marriage" between the genius of Mozart and the subject matter of Don Juan, and many have followed him in this view. I could not disagree more completely; the whole basis of the Don Juan legend seems to me curiously out of Mozart's intellectual, ethical, and metaphysical style. Very few people nowadays see Mozart as a "daemonic" composer, even if they think of music as a daemonic art. In a work like the G-minor Quintet, we sense an exquisitely constrained pathos, in the Piano Concerto in C minor a controlled foreshadowing of Beethovenian tragedy, in the Requiem Mass a certain frustration strikingly symbol-ized by its noncompletion. As an opera composer, Mozart had dwelt more profoundly than anyone else on man in relation to other men and women, never in relation to God and the universe. Then suddenly theology was thrust on him at the end of Don Giovanni-right at the end, when things were getting rushed, as usual. He did his best, a very wonderful best, but everything we know or feel about Mozart should assure us that the inflexible view of sin and death set forth in the legend must have been distasteful to him. . .

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III. [Kerman compares attitudes toward Tom Rakewell, a rakish figure in Igor Stravinsky's opera the Rake's Progress who echoes certain aspects of Don Giovanni, and Mozart's Don:]

Obviously this use of humor is diametrically opposed to that in Don Giovanni, in which the fun is always turned against Don Giovanni's victims; we always laugh with him, even when he himself is fooled, for he always sees the joke (unlike Tom, who has no sense of humor). Attitudes towards these two protagonists are hardly determined by their actions or their degree of objective rakishness. Our different modes of sympathy are determined by the music, of course, and by the different directions of the comedy. We regard Tom always with some amusement, and with some compound of pity and impatience, whereas Don Giovanni earns our admiration. . .

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IV. [Kerman talks about this Trio (a musical number involving three singers) from Don Giovanni at some length. Don't worry if you can't follow all the details of his argument; We'll discuss it together on Wednesday.]

In the trio near the beginning of Act II, Donna Elvira steps out to her veranda in the romantic spell of a Spanish evening, to indulge the most mixed of feelings towards her faithless, irresistible libertine, who, meanwhile, below, wanting her out of the way in order to make love to her maid, lights on the scheme of serenading her and then delivering her in the darkness to an only half-unwilling Leporello disguised in his master's cloak.

Elvira's initial mood is struck by the opening violin phrase the trio and by her gentler reply. The music is more songlike an usual for a sonata theme, even in a slow movement-as should be for a lady's private meditation. But in certain unsolved features it shows signs of belonging to a larger dramatic unit: the delicate, half-mocking variation of the opening phrase and the sensuous chromatic cadence as Elvira's heart melts:

Ah, taci, ingiusto core,
non palpitarmi in seno;
è un empio, é un traditore,
è colpa aver pietà.

Unjust heart, be silent,
My breast, your trembling halt;
Sinner is he, deceiver-
To pity were a fault.

The composer can sense and develop a feeling latent in this most unprepossessing bit of a libretto. As soon as Elvira uses, Don Giovanni and Leporello mutter together on a vial thematic tag matched to the scurrility of their intention. [e initial situation or tableau, still in the tonic key, already rits of movement: the two more active persons are heard
oer Elvira has said her piece, and their repetitious phraseol-y has the effect of acceleration.
This rhythmic intensification prepares for Don Giovanni's un act, a firm step to the dominant key as he steps up to dress Elvira (he stands behind Leporello, who is to pretend sing). Thus the essential action begins, the seduction of iira. The tension, the peril of this action is maintained by dominant. In this key, Don Giovanni sings to the same 'lodic fragments that had marked Elvira's heart-strokes, uctically answering her thought. At the end, Elvira and Leporello sing the trivial second theme, so excellently designed asides:

(Numi, che strano effetto. . .)
(State a veder la pazza . . .)

Because they do not hear one another, perhaps, the phrase can now overlap itself; in any case the compression gives another subtle touch of growing urgency.

This is the dramatic exposition, corresponding to a musical section analogous to the exposition of a sonata form. Now comes the development. A new phase is implied by a rich, modulation in the orchestra (to bVI-this modulation, incidentally, always seems to crop up in Mozart's seduction scenes). As the key contrast is extended and the sense of excitement grows, Don Giovanni warms to his task in a newly persuasive, fertile lyric line. As he presses, Elvira protests more and the struggle becomes close. She cuts him short in a sudden agitato-the heart-beats in the orchestra are more serious now; the music begins to modulate again, more rap-phrases overlap, his increasingly ardent, hers al-de hysterical-pazza, as they say many times in the ompletely carried away, Don Giovanni reiterates his 'Ah, credemi, o m'uccido!" on the extended domipoint of highest tension. Meanwhile Leporello is ifully trying to restrain his laughter. Elvira falls si-a moment the dominant hovers; then Leporello's ;hter guides the music to the inevitable resolution nic key.
te director has to contrive some sign of Elvira's sur-)mething more delicate, let us hope, than the usual horseplay). The action itself is over, but its effect be gauged in an ending tableau, the recapitulation ty sonata form. The three singers simultaneously ir individual feelings, which have developed during and which naturally conflict. But they are all placed ngle musical spell, as clear and magical as the moon-r diversity is united by the musical continuity. El-st distraught, hardly knows what to think of her kness. Leporello, no longer laughing, wishes her blesses her credulity; he speaks for the audience. 'anni says that he is proud of his amorous talent, are to believe the music, it is with a mysterious hu-is just as touched by Elvira's surrender as he had :he death of the old man in an earlier trio. That is what makes him irresistible. The themes return all in the tonic key, held together in the orchestra as the singers smoothly harmonize almost in the background. The music moves beautifully towards the subdominant, and there is a touch of expansion to the chattering theme that accommodated the various asides.

At the very end, one element which had not been accounted for in the form comes to its fruition: Elvira's romantic chromatic thirds are repeated and repeated twice for the final cadence, while her own line has a new decoration, wonder-fully delicate, tremulous, and warm. This brings the whole episode together in a flash; more, it brings a piercing new inflection-Elvira is no longer the same, or at least our understanding and sympathy have matured. In a single musical piece, action has been incorporated, unified, and interpreted. Resolved in itself, the little scene guides the total drama forward, for our sense of the total piece depends upon impression of Elvira here. In an analogous way, the slow movement of a Mozart sonata, perfectly realized in itself, plays a guiding part in the composition as a whole.

To a very fine critic of Mozart's operas, Edward J. Dent, this trio was the most beautiful number in Don Giovanni, which is practically to say in the whole of opera, and I should not be inclined to contradict him. Here, however, I have analyzed it mainly in order to show the great dramaturgical value of ensembles of this sort. Action is included within a single tinuity, and unified by it. The situation changes, and everybody feels differently; this was never so within a baroque aria or chorus. And to have replaced some of the nautral recitative used for action in baroque opera by a genuinely musical carrier was plainly advantageous: action could now be presented on the imaginative level of music, so as to to share the emotional dignity of the aria introspections. Elvira's trio has the coherence of a movement in sonata form-a coherence whose establishment occupied the best efforts of classic composers, and which became one of the most impressive achievements in all of music. The trio follows the sonata-form closely, though it is certainly simpler than the best instrumental examples. In a sense Tovey [Donald Tovey, a highly regarded English music critic] was right to maintain that symphonic form was too "dramatic" for the stage. But however this may be, a developed classic ensemble is infinitely more complex than the richest of baroque forms, such as the opening chorus of a Bach cantata, for all its fantastic accumulation of detail. In Mozart things modify their interrelation, -conflicts are set, developed, and solved. No less than in a Bach chorus, if less obsessively, there is for the whole scene a single imaginative intensity, an integrating point of view.

We can also see the value, indeed the necessity, of operatic ensembles for the dramatic mode of comedy. Imagine Mozart's episode handled by Metastasio. At least three arias with linking recitative would be needed to do it at all: one for Elvira, showing her initial state of mind, one for Don Giovanni, and then another for Elvira, showing her final state of mind. The whole of Leporello's role, which wonderfully keeps the comic balance, would evaporate in recitative, to say nothing of all the delicate shades of modulation in the attitudes of Don Giovanni and Elvira en route. Each aria would take about three minutes. . . and this is only one brief episode among a dozen in the libretto. Eighteenth-century comedy, with its wealth of lively intrigue, demanded a newly pliant operatic scheme.

Comedy needs speed, and the ensemble provides it; Mozart's trio works on a time-scale rather faster than likely in real life (and indeed the scene would not be funny at all if he dwelt on it much longer). Comedy needs a casual atmosphere at least some of the time; characters cannot take themselves as seriously as the Didos, the Orpheuses, and the suffering Christians of the baroque dramatic world. With a musical continuity determined largely by the orchestral progress, you can have Don Giovanni muttering away in the background to a piece of musical nonsense, for this can fit excellently into the mercurial texture of a classic piece. Comedy requires a sense of surface verisimilitude; its convention cannot seem stiff. This is a relative matter, of course, but the classic ensemble technique proved admirably flexible and lifelike, certainly as contrasted with the stately artifice of Lully or Metastasio.

The dramatic flexibility of the genre can be demonstrated properly only by means of a catalogue raisonné of Mozart's ensembles. In form they are remarkably free, or at least the freedom might appear remarkable to those who consider classic form dogmatic. An ensemble rarely comes as close as Elvira's trio to the precise plan of sonata form, for a single dramatic action rarely falls precisely into the sonata-form dynamic. But the general principles of sonata construction, which I have discussed, are always powerfully at work in Mozart's operas. . .

Classic opera buffa still kept the matrix of secco recitative [literally, "dry" or speaking recitation] inherited from opera seria ["serious opera," a more old-fashioned form of opera]. Most of the action, indeed, proceeded on the level of recitative, in chatter that was at least amusing, if old-fashioned in style. But the important action was reserved for the higher musical level of the ensembles. Arias were also included, of course, some of them light and humorous and probably rather trivial, some of them serious. Like Purcell and Gluck, Mozart and the other composers of opera buffa appreciated the power of a small number of arias well placed in the total form.

The importance of the ensemble, however, cannot be overemphasized, even with composers who used it sparingly. Conventionally ensembles were employed for the beginnings of acts, where vivid exposition was needed, and particularly at the ends of acts, where the plot reached its maximum complexity and brilliance. The temptation was to absorb more and more of the end of the act into its finale. . .