The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural and Musical Background to Le Nozze Di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte

Rating:
Summary: A clear and concise treatment of a complex topic
Review: Any complete study of the life and works of Mozart would take thousands of pages and hundreds of recordings just to crack the surface of this subject. Even merely the operas of Mozart cannot be adequately handled in a single volume (let alone the number of recordings involved). So on a much more modest scale, we have Andrew Steptoe's "The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas" from the Clarendon Paperbacks division of Oxford University Press (1988, reprinted 2001).

For those wondering about that title, Lorenzo Da Ponte was the fascinating character who wrote the libretti to three of Mozart's greatest operas. In fact, the subtitle of this book is "The Cultural and Musical Background to 'Le Nozze di Figaro,' 'Don Giovanni,' and 'Cosi fan tutte,' but the book does not even get to those works until page 98. Roughly the first third of the book gives us an excellently organized and clear background to the works and the chapter titles will tell you exactly what I mean: "The Social Context: Vienna and Her Ruler," "Musicians, Audience, and Opera in Mozart's Time," "Mozart and Vienna," and "Mozart and His Personal Circle." The next chapter deals with Da Ponte and the opera buffa tradition, and we finally have what we need to understand more fully what Mozart's audiences saw in these works that are all but lost to us.

The sixth chapter talks about "Cosi fan tutte" and how it reflected the moral climate of the day, while the next one discusses how Mozart treated the buffa plot from the musical standpoint. The remaining three chapters handle each of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations, and there are detailed synopses of the works in the appendix.

Although I have read most of this material before, I have never seen it put in so well-organized a fashion; and my next move is to reread it, putting margin notes in along the way. I plan to make much use of this book in my opera seminars, and the general reader (who will need some rudimentary knowledge of music to understand at least parts of this book) will find in it many a key to a deeper understanding of these three masterworks.