Luca Andrea Giordano

Don Giovanni (Mozart - Da Ponte): From Legend to Myth Luca Andrea Giordano

Publisher Marketing: One of the most used and abused myths in literature, music, and art in general - and even common discourse - is without doubt that of Don Juan. Revised countless times by diverse artistic personalities, and originating in popular legend, Don Juan was first given literary personality in the tragic drama El burlador de Sevilla (1630), attributed to the Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina. Through a literary selection composed by the most significant accounts, one participates in a parable in which the myth starts from a seventeenth century conception (in which those who violate the law are condemned), passes to a romantic one in which those who transgress are self-conscious at the same time, and finally funnels through the dawn of the twentieth century (in which the rebellion against social laws is seen as normal). Ethical individualism becomes a tragic but necessary choice - to finally arrive at the mythical contemporary interpretation in which the hero rejects the bourgeois values of society preferring geometric abstraction or neurosis to the real and sensitive universe. However, it is in the transposition to music that the myth of the impertinent libertine acquires a unique fascination, because it has sprung from the familiar, sensual and mysterious fusion of such seemingly different languages but which in substance create, in complete unison, the trait d'union between the living being and the sublime. From the seventeenth century onwards, there are many works inspired by this character, including opera and dance. Without a doubt, the most known work comes from the exceptional nature of the Mozart-Da Ponte. The present work, inspired by some critical reflections, deals with the meeting between an extraordinarily malleable myth, a composer and a librettist capable of recognizing, and lifting to unthinkable heights, the symbolic components of the ancient legend, sealing a unique alchemy able to transmit even the smallest nuances of human nature.