About this Piece

Mozart’s move to Vienna in 1781 was a momentous event in the life of the young composer from Salzburg. Once he arrived in the bustling Austrian capital, his enthusiasm for and his enterprise in his adopted city were enormous; he desperately wanted to succeed on his own terms as an independent artist rather than as an indentured musician. He plunged into a schedule of various activities—composing, performing, and teaching—with a vengeance, and through his nonstop labors he quickly established an enviable career. That the popularity of this amazing genius should have peaked in three short years (1784 was his most successful season), only to go into decline after that, is an account written on one of the bitterest pages in music history.

By 1786, Mozart had to travel to Prague to enjoy the acclaim that his music fully deserved. In the Bohemian city, The Marriage of Figaro had become the rage, and the Prague Opera, anxious to duplicate its success, asked the composer for a new work for the following season. Partnering again with Figaro librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart produced Don Giovanni, which premiered on October 29, 1787. If the city was not aroused to anything approaching the Figaro furor of the previous season, it still responded positively to the new work (Figaro, as a comedy, has a popularity quotient that is more immediate than the darker Giovanni).

The overture, written in typical Mozartian style (the ink, it is said, was barely dry on its pages at the dress rehearsal), is one of the composer’s typical masterpieces. The andante opening is one of the composer’s most telling dramatic strokes, the more impressive for being a synthesis of the slow, menacing music that occurs in the opera’s penultimate scene. There, when Giovanni, the murderer, is confronted by the stone statue of his victim, the D-minor intensity is extended throughout the action; Mozart’s telescoping of this seething atmosphere at the beginning of the opera remarkably exemplifies his awareness of theatricality at its most potent. The music here murmurs and shouts and, most impressively, contains those sinister ascending and descending scales that portend the doom of the philandering Giovanni at the opera’s climax.

As for the allegro that constitutes the overture proper, none of it is derived from the opera; this music, with its vigorous bravado, serves to characterize the spirited escapades of the forever pleasure-seeking Don Juan.

—Orrin Howard