The Don Giovanni Moment
The Don Giovanni Moment

Author: Lydia Goehr

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006-08-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0231510640

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Mozart's Don Giovanni is an operatic masterpiece full of iconic and mythical tensions that still resonate today. The work redefines the terms of power, seduction, and morality, and the resulting conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and romanticism. The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart's opera in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century. The prominent scholars in this collection address the opera's impact on the philosophical visions of Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Williams and its influence on the literary and dramatic works of Pushkin, Hoffmann, Mörike, Byron, Wagner, Strauss, and Shaw. Through a close and careful analysis of Don Giovanni's literary and philosophical reception and its many appropriations, rewritings, and retellings, these contributors treat the opera as a vantage point from which theory and philosophy can reconsider romanticism's central themes. As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart's brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.

Harmony in Haydn and Mozart
Harmony in Haydn and Mozart

Author: David Damschroder

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1107025346

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Innovative analytical techniques provide a penetrating view of how Haydn and Mozart employ harmony in their compositions.

The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni
The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Author: Magnus Tessing Schneider

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1000510530

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The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.

Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart
Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart

Author: Wye Jamison Allanbrook

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 022643771X

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Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music was a “pure play” of key and theme, more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook’s innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythms and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.

Elective Affinities
Elective Affinities

Author: Lydia Goehr

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0231144814

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As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War.

In Defense of Don Giovanni
In Defense of Don Giovanni

Author: Luisa Passerini

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1685711448

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Who wants to champion the figure of Don Giovanni in the time of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo? Don Giovanni is a rapist, murderer, serial seducer, and a liar. Can he ever be held up as a role model or seen as a figure to be enjoyed? This is the task that the eminent Italian historian and lifelong feminist, Luisa Passerini, sets for herself in In Defense of Don Giovanni. As she developed the long arc of her distinguished career, Don Giovanni surprisingly became not only her role model but also a secret object of research.Taking her method from oral history, Passerini creates a series of characters with whom she discusses the forms and incarnations of the myth of Don Giovanni across time, from its first appearance in early medieval Spain and Commedia dell'Arte to its many European variations and its transposition to the colonial and postcolonial world in the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. Pivoting round Don Giovanni's best known incarnation in Mozart's opera, Passerini and he interlocutors meet in different locations from Venice and Bern to Paris and Turin. They discuss plays, films, and operas and talk about art, novels, and psychoanalytic interpretations of the myth while also sharing their own life stories, in which Don Giovanni often plays a part that is, by turns, destructive, mischievous, and full of the joy of life. From his early beginnings in the Iberian Peninsula to recent analysis of the sexuality of colonial conquest and postcolonial revenge and return, Don Giovanni shape-shifts between rapacious hypermasculinity, comic trickster, and morally vacuous loser whose annoyingly persistent nemesis Don Ottavio emerges as an alternative and ultimately better object of desire. As she tracts Don Giovanni's image across the world and through the centuries, however, Passerini comes to see that it also plays another role, that of mirror, in which women can see themselves emerge as individuals with their own life force. -- back cover.

Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni

Author: Burton, Fisher D. Publishing Staff

Publisher: Opera Journeys Publishing

Published: 2000-04

Total Pages: 33

ISBN-13: 0967397332

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Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas
Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Author: Kristi Brown-Montesano

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0520385799

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Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

W. A. Mozart: Don Giovanni
W. A. Mozart: Don Giovanni

Author: Julian Rushton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1981-10-29

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780521296632

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A study of Mozart's Don Giovanni, one of the best known and most often performed opears of the last 200 years.

Opera's Second Death
Opera's Second Death

Author: Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 113520778X

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Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera - the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.