TY  - BOOK
AU  - Felicity Baker
AU  - Magnus Tessing Schneider
PY  - 2021
CY  - Berlin, Germany
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 9783631851180
TI  - Don Giovanni’s Reasons: Thoughts on a masterpiece
DO  - 10.3726/b18224
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1111671
N2  - Although Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) is the most analysed of all operas, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto has rarely been studied as a work of poetry in its own right. The author argues that the libretto, rather than perpetuating the conservative religious morality implicit in the story of Don Juan, subjects our culture’s myth of human sexuality to a critical rewriting. Combining poetic close reading with approaches drawn from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, legal history, intellectual history, literary history, art history and theatrical performance analysis, she studies the Don Giovanni libretto as a radical political text of the Late Enlightenment, which has lost none of its ability to provoke. The questions it raises concerning the nature of compassion, seduction and violence, and the autonomy and responsibility of the individual, are still highly relevant for us today.
KW  - Da Ponte, Mozart, opera librettos, Don Juan, antisemitism, Enlightenment
LA  - English
ER  -