Casanova and Da Ponte: The Lives and Afterlives of "Don Giovanni"
Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo: Part 2
A heads-up that this article contains some frank descriptions of sexual abuse and incest. Please take care while reading.
Welcome to Part 2 of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ll be exploring opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off. If you missed Part 1, check out The Medici: Sex, Power, and the Birth of Opera.
The fate of Don Giovanni is one thing.
He’s at a dinner, his companion the statue commemorating the man he killed only a few hours earlier (the logic of how one can erect a full statue within hours of its subject’s death speaks to a larger discussion around the logic of all statues). It’s there that the rake is ordered by the Commendatore to repent for what Errol Flynn would have termed his wicked, wicked ways. The Don refuses and is promptly dragged to hell. Disappeared from the world he inhabited (one without any other hints of the supernatural), the rest of the characters resume their ordinary lives. It’s doubtful that, to them, the Don merits a statue.
But the Don’s legacy is another matter. And such a legacy has outlasted centuries of statues.
The finale of Don Giovanni, as staged by Iván Fischer for the Budapest Festival Orchestra. (Photo: Jane Hobson)
Mozart’s synonymous 1787 opera isn’t the first incarnation of the Don Juan legend. The first written version of it, Tirso de Molina’s play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, is dated 1630. But Mozart’s version is one of the most memorable, in part thanks to how much interpretive license it gives audiences and performers. With an identical score and libretto, directors and singers have created as many versions of the Don as there are women in Spain that the Don has, erm, versioned (1,003, if you’re keeping track). It’s a spectrum of shades blending seducer and rapist, which makes it a vehicle for our own neuroses and desires.
Such moral ambiguity was for Aristotle, whose notion of catharsis was foundational for opera in the age of the Camerata, the essence of tragedy. And a large part of Don Giovanni’s ambiguity is thanks to its librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, as well as Da Ponte’s compatriot, contemporary, and — according to some historians — contributor to the libretto, Giacomo Casanova.
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in April 1725, into a family that challenged the sexual norms of 18th-century Venice. His mother, the actress Zanetta Farussi, had married fellow thespian Girolamo Casanova nine months earlier. Immediately his identity was wrapped up with sensuality and ambiguity: While Zanetta had married Girolamo, many believed that Girolamo never fathered a child with his wife. Some speculated that Giacomo may have even been the son of a nobleman who patronized Zanetta and her young family.
The enigma of Casanova’s paternity, as biographer Laurence Bergreen suggests, is central to his own subsequent identity as a seducer. Yet, while Zanetta and Girolamo enjoyed the protection of their patron, their jobs as actors were essentially one step removed from prostitution. At age 9, Casanova left Venice to be educated in Padua. This was perhaps because the urban pollution of his hometown was giving him frequent nosebleeds, but may also have been more prescient: Venetian society was at the time more conservative than others, and the status of the Casanova family was not exactly conducive to a good career (although Zanetta’s own work as an actress may have benefitted from the rumors that swirled around the paternity of her children — including one that her second son was the product of an affair with the Prince of Wales).
According to Casanova’s 12-volume, nearly 4,000-page, 1.2 million-word memoirs, he became well-versed in more than one subject while in Padua. Under the tutelage of ecclesiastical and civil law scholar (and priest) Antonio Maria Gozzi, he enrolled in the University of Padua at 12 and graduated with a law degree at 17. While in Venice he struggled with reading, he thrived under his tutelage in Padua, mastering Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and also picking up skills like the violin.
John Malkovich and Veronica Ferres in The Casanova Variations, a 2014 film based on the Malkovich-led stage play The Giacomo Variations
But Padua was also the site of Casanova’s sexual awakening, namely with Gozzi’s younger sister Bettina. Just a few years older than her brother’s pupil, Bettina helped serve as caretaker for the boy and would allegedly give her young charge "childish caresses which, since I was bound to consider them innocent, made me chide myself for letting them trouble me."
A formative moment for Casanova in this time came when Bettina was washing his legs. This, he writes, “caused me such intense voluptuousness that the feeling did not stop until it could be carried no further.” We can assume based on what he writes that what was carried out was done as a solo act, which left the young Giacomo all the more confused and embarrassed. He begged Bettina's forgiveness, much to her surprise. Instead, Bettina told Giacomo "that the fault was entirely her own, but that she would never again be guilty of it.”
Casanova continued to berate himself for this, believing he brought dishonor onto the Gozzi house, until when, shortly after this episode, he catches Bettina in bed with a young boy from town. His knee-jerk response, which was to exact revenge on both Bettina and the boy by poisoning them both, is indicative of how his passion would quickly overcome his shame and set the tone for how he lived the rest of his life. (He didn’t, it should be mentioned, go through with this revenge plot.)
In the end, Casanova lost his virginity, not in Padua to Bettina, but in Venice to a woman named Nanetta. And to her sister, Marta. At the same time. And this was after Casanova took the first set of vows that would have set him up for the chaste life of a priest.
Now may be a good opportunity to talk about Casanova’s reliability as a narrator.
Since the initial publication of Casanova’s memoirs, there are those who have devoted entire careers to parsing truth from fiction. Out of deference to the still-living women he was writing about, Casanova’s original manuscript leaves many names omitted, leading scholars to put the puzzle pieces together based on supporting documents and the plausibility of each story of his life. This extends beyond his stories from the bedroom, which only comprise about one-third of his memoir.
Did Casanova, through mainly his own wits, really visit over 130 cities in his life? Did he have the arguments he documented, verbatim, with Voltaire while both were in Russia as guests of Catherine the Great? Did he orchestrate a Grand Budapest Hotel–like escape from Venice’s notorious Piombi prison in the Doge’s Palace, and later elude arrest in France and Spain? Did he really bed over 125 women (and a handful of men)? And did he manage to overcome 11 STDs?
Yes, is the surprising answer to many of the questions.
For a man who wrote that he was born, not for the priesthood but “for the fair sex, I have ever loved it dearly, and I have been loved by it as often and as much as I could,” Casanova was also born in the right place at the right time. Europe in the Enlightenment era brought with it (especially once Casanova left Venice) a liberated view on sex and sensuality. Medici-era ideas, like being a man who slept with many women signifying that one was weak or un-masculine, began to recede in the middle of the 1600s. Now, as Casanova would prove, it was indicative of the opposite.
The Enlightenment ideal of liberty also extended to women, who began to gain a larger (though still relatively small) share of voice. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley) would first publish A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which argued for the education of women so that they could break free of their “blind obedience” to men.
“I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me,” Wollstonecraft wrote, echoing the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason. “Unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”
Like Wollstonecraft, Casanova also became a poster child of the Enlightenment, but one whose reputation as such meant that many of the unsavory details of his life could be gaslit or left in the dark in order to uphold his image as a swashbuckling libertine.
With many of these women’s lives largely undocumented, what actually happened has been a blank that’s impossible to fill in. Yet Casanova’s reputation as a seducer, a ripper of bodices in a strait-laced time, tends to be equated with that of a liberator. Literary critic Michael Dirda argues that, while Casanova was only monogamous to the idea of polygamy, “he seldom abandons the woman—instead he finds her a husband, lines up a new protector, or sends her home with gifts and money.”
Dirda also suggests that “Casanova tended to describe women as younger than they were — some tender beauties were often closer to 30 than to sweet 16. (It’s been suggested that many of the ladies may have simply lied to him about their age.),” thereby excusing the more uncomfortable passages in Casanova’s memoirs that involve women who are even younger than 16. (Coincidentally, many of the critics and scholars who blanketly defend Casanova are men.)
But we do know, by Casanova’s own admission, that he repeatedly broke his own commandment that “without love [sex] is a vile thing.” In his early 20s, Casanova “bought” the virginity of a young girl from her mother, paying in advance. When the girl refused his advances:
“I got hold of a broomstick and gave her a good lesson, in order to get something for the ten sequins which I had been foolish enough to pay in advance,” he recounts in his memoirs. “But I have broken none of her limbs, and I took care to apply my blows only on her posteriors, on which spot I have no doubt that all the marks may be seen. In the evening I made her dress herself again, and sent her back in a boat which chanced to pass, and she was landed in safety. The mother received ten sequins, the daughter has kept her hateful maidenhood, and, if I am guilty of anything, it is only of having given a thrashing to an infamous girl, the pupil of a still more infamous mother.”
Two decades later, while in Russia, he “purchased” a 13-year–old girl from her father, who sold her to Casanova as a sexual slave. He immediately assaulted her.
In describing these affairs, as well as those of Casanova's contemporary, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Larry Wolff suggests that this was the Enlightenment version of playing devil's advocate, pushing the boundaries of what was sexually acceptable in this new age.
By focusing on “the forbidden aspect of sex with a child, the interplay of innocence and incest that made the envisioned sexual relation seem somehow horrific to [Rousseau's] vividly engaged imagination… recapitulated the cultural course of eighteenth-century perspectives on childhood, the increasing appreciation of innocence that would eventually make sex with children seem distinctly more extreme, that is, perverse, than the ordinary indulgences of voracious libertinism.”
Whether or not she was actually 9 or if Casanova just aged her down to seem more edgy, he still talks about “caressing” the nine-year–old daughter of a former lover (presumably not a product of their union), and what he suggested next to his ex, Irene, was tantamount to prostitution: Introducing Irene to a local baron, “who loved little girls as much as I did,” Casanova noted that the baron was as attracted to “Irene’s girl” as well and “asked the mother to do him the same honor sometime that she had done me.” That the baron would be able to protect Irene’s involvement in an illegal gambling ring led Casanova to encourage Irene to take him up on this offer. “That was lucky for Irene.”
But Casanova took the sense of boundary-pushing one step further when he slept with his own daughter, Leonilda. He only realized she was his daughter when he presented to her family as her fiancé, and his would-be mother-in-law, an Italian noblewoman named Donna Lucrezia, cleared matters up. (Cementing a pattern of behavior, Casanova fathered Leonilda at the same time that he deflowered Lucrezia's 17-year–old sister Angelica, who was just a few weeks away from being married).
In Casanova’s telling, the affair was laughed off as a charming coincidence, and the marriage called off. But that didn’t stop him from then sleeping with both mother and daughter.
At least one biographer (Laurence Bergreen) skates around the idea that Casanova was indeed Leonilda’s biological father. As DNA tests weren’t possible in 18th-century Europe, they would have had no way of knowing. But he certainly believed himself to be the father, and continued to keep a relationship with Leonilda after she married another man. Based on Casanova and his son-in-law’s shared membership in the Freemasons, he considered them both to be “freethinkers,” which he used as logic to then go to bed with Leonilda. She gave birth to their child, at once her brother and son, at once his son and grandson.
“I have never been able to understand how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without having slept with her at least once,” Casanova would later write. “My inability to entertain such a conception has always convinced me, and convinces me still more forcibly today, that my mind and my material part are one and the same substance.”
Casanova also weaponized his sexuality, using the trust of women to finance what Lorenzo Da Ponte would describe in his own memoirs as “an infinitude of vices.” It’s in this context that we meet Casanova in Da Ponte’s autobiography, using both his power as a seducer and his interest in the occult to swindle a 60-something woman out of her gold and jewelry. (He immediately lost it, entrusting the score to a valet who took off, never to be heard from again.)
While Casanova had taken the first steps to becoming a priest before abandoning the enterprise, Lorenzo Da Ponte went one step further. Born Emanuele Conegliano in Venice in 1749, the son of a Jewish tanner, Da Ponte later converted to Catholicism in order to enter the priesthood (the easiest way for the boy to get a free education). He also inherited his name from the Cenedan bishop who instructed him and baptized him into the Catholic faith. Da Ponte was ordained in 1773.
Divine orders, however, didn’t make Da Ponte any more virtuous than his compatriot, Casanova. In 1777, Da Ponte met Angioletta Bellaudi, whose mother-in-law, Laura, had rented a room in her house to the young priest and tutor. Angioletta had arrived in Venice from Florence with her father, a dance instructor, and was described by many as “precocious,” which was, to the conservative Venetians, a landing strip to “immodest behavior.” Angioletta was married to Carlo Bellaudi, mostly because he had impregnated her at 15.
By some accounts, she was unfaithful, and Da Ponte encouraged her when he became a tenant. Carlo's sister reportedly saw the pregnant Angioletta and Lorenzo in a compromising position, an accusation that Da Ponte refuted by screaming “May God strike me down with a thunderbolt while celebrating Mass.” That gave him the benefit of the doubt, until Carlo’s mother saw him standing, naked, in the doorway of his room, facing the room of her daughter-in-law’s. He was then evicted.
By Da Ponte’s account, however, the real villain was Carlo. Carlo had fallen in love with another woman, Francesca Bertati, to the point of “detesting his consort and desiring her death.” Angioletta had discovered the affair when, pregnant, she found a set of letters from Carlo to Francesca. In one, Carlo told his lover that he planned to act as his wife’s midwife so that he could kill her during labor, making it look like an accident. Implored to help Angioletta, Da Ponte found a cousin who had a spare room and brought Angioletta there where she supposedly arrived at 6 and gave birth by 9. In Da Ponte’s version of things, he kept his clothes on.
“I myself nourished sentiments of esteem and affection for her,” Da Ponte would later recall. “Perhaps in others than in me, such an affection might have become a dangerous thing: but I had made myself a rule never to mingle love and crime.”
Unlike Casanova’s memoirs, Da Ponte’s are more easily debunked through fact-checking, including statements such as the one above. By 1779, the priest would face a Venetian tribunal for “public concubinage and abduction of a respectable woman” as a result of a two-year affair with Angioletta (whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to pass off as his sister). The couple sometimes lived together, including one stint in a brothel where Da Ponte played violin while wearing his cassock. They had at least two children, both of whom were left in an orphanage for foundlings.
Yet it was this affair that led to Da Ponte’s 15-year banishment from Venice, which ultimately led him to Vienna. There, in the court of Joseph II, he met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and began to work with the composer, beginning with 1786’s Le nozze di Figaro, based on a revolutionary Beaumarchais comedy. The story of servants subverting the nobility, including a crucial plot point hinging on droit du seigneur, embodied the Enlightened ideals of freedom, but also caused a scandal in court (at this time, Joseph II’s sister, Marie Antoinette, was seeing the downside of the Enlightenment and Beaumarchaisian politics from her home in Versailles).
The following year, Da Ponte and Mozart collaborated again. Don Giovanni was commissioned by Prague impresario Guardasoni after the success of Figaro’s local premiere. What most likely happened was that Mozart was asked to expand on a one-act libretto about the same Don Juan legend of Tirso de Molina’s 1630 play, and Da Ponte was brought on to do a major rewrite while also layering in influences from Molière’s Dom Juan and some of the plays he had remembered from the Venetian theater scene. (Not one to abandon credit, Da Ponte claims that the idea was entirely his.)
The premiere of Don Giovanni was set for Prague’s Estates Theatre at the end of October 1787, and Mozart arrived in the city earlier that month, still finishing up the score. While the collaboration largely went undocumented in both men’s memoirs, it is entirely possible that Casanova helped Mozart with changes to the libretto while Da Ponte remained in Vienna. He had arrived in Bohemia a few years earlier, broke, homeless, and past his prime as a seducer. He took a job as the librarian for Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein and moved into his castle in the backwater town of Dux.
It was a nice home and a generous salary, but it left Casanova bored to the point of depression and possibly ending his life. His health took a turn, and his relationship with the Count was strained. As an alternative to suicide, Casanova was encouraged to write his memoirs, which he wound up doing obsessively. Perhaps such self reflection lent itself well to adding some expert color to Da Ponte’s libretto. Given that reading Casanova’s memoirs now is a herculean effort with few options for English translations (and many earlier editions being heavily edited to avoid charges of indecency), Don Giovanni may then be the most ubiquitous biography of Casanova.
Much like Casanova’s own memoirs (which, unlike Da Ponte’s memoirs, seem to have some understanding of their author’s moral failings even if Casanova himself did not), Don Giovanni presents its central character openly, allowing us to examine the flaws he himself may not be aware of. Characters are blank slates, their own reactions and interpretations of events open to interpretation. Moreover, with Don Giovanni, these characters are brought to life.
This is a prospect both thrilling and frustrating. As director Jonathan Miller once put it, “Who are these people?” Even characters like Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, who have multiple arias that delve into their psychology, are seen only in relation to the Don. On their own, Miller argues, they’re left without personalities or a shared social reality.
The Don is even more abstruse. His arias are short and superficial — a bubbly “Champagne Aria,” a window serenade, and a traffic-directing set of instructions. The Don, while the title character of his own store, becomes a lot like Godot, the X that all other characters are solving for onstage.
But this lack of a shared social reality is also a demarcation between the boundaries of theater and real life, and it’s one that many people often ignore. Who we side with in the work says more about us than it does about the characters themselves.
Last year, Opera Atelier director Marshall Pynkoski told the Toronto Star that he felt the Don was “the most honest person on the stage,” leaving the women who fall for him as stupid. “How could these women be attracted to this sleazebag, to this horrible person?” Marshall wonders, in an AP-level equation of moral calculus.
“Inside Don Giovanni’s cloak is hidden the fantasy of almost every man in love with opera,” Catherine Clément proposes in Opera: The Undoing of Women. Calling on the work of Freud (which we’ll get to in greater depth next week), Clément places the last century of sexual assault and rape in psychological context. Having heard so many stories of daughters raped by so many fathers, Freud finally decided that only one side could be telling the truth. He sided with the fathers. Such a legacy, Clément argues, has allowed musicologists like Henri Barrault and Pierre Jean Jouve to suggest that women like Donna Anna desire rape, and are therefore, to go back to Pynkoski, the ones at fault.
What they miss, however, is that Don Giovanni’s lies run rampant through the opera, like Casanova in the coffers of a rich dowager obsessed with the occult. He passes himself off as his own valet, he promises (an empty promise) Zerlina to marry her and make her a noblewoman. He — and this is inarguable — kills Donna Anna’s father and then lies by omission. It’s similar to the lie that Freud tells when he suggests that women are the only ones capable of hysteria.
The flip side of lying by omission, selective memory, is often applied to monstrous men. As Amy Collier put it, “Casanova is an accurate name for an amoral womanizer, but our culture has erased the immorality and lauded the womanizing.” In a 2017 New York Times article, critic Anthony Tommasini waxed on his collection of recordings featuring James Levine, who at the time had been suspended from the Met while they investigated openly-secret allegations that the conductor had sexually abused several men, many when they were still teenagers.
While writing that he feels “heartache” for the men who spoke up on their experiences with Levine, “someone in a position of intimidating authority,” Tommasini still wonders “how do Mr. Levine’s countless fans, and I as a critic, reconcile his legacy with what he’s been accused of? Is his work tainted beyond our ability to appreciate the artistry involved?”
The letters received and published in response to this article included several defenses of Levine, including one reader who asked: “should Mr. Levine now, at this late stage in his career, be dismissed after what he has given the world through his musical artistry?” Perhaps in 200 years “Levine” will be an accurate name for a brilliant sexual abuser, but our culture will erase the sexual abuse and laud the brilliance. Perhaps that’s already happening.
What the life of Casanova against the legacy of Don Giovanni shows us is that this ability to shape the narrative is analogous to the power of perception, and the perception of power, that the Medici wielded for centuries. It extends into the stories that we tell today. In and of itself, that idea of power is yet another story we tell.
Thanks for subscribing to Undone. Next week: Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, Part 3: Beautiful Singing, Hysterical Women.
Further Reading and Viewing
“These People”: On Sebastian Baumgarten’s Don Giovanni by Julia Sirmons for The Opera Quarterly (2013)
Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice by Larry Wolff (2012)
Lorenzo Da Ponte: A Biography of Mozart’s Librettist by April FitzLyon (2011)
History of My Life, by Giacomo Casanova (Willard R. Trask, trans., 2007)
Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte by Lorenzo Da Ponte (Elisabeth Abbott, trans., 2000)
The Casanova Variations, a 2014 film starring John Malkovich, is available to stream online