The Jesuit and the Libertine: Some Early Reception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni

When the world becomes learned and philosophical, Fable refines to Allegory.

—Elizabeth Montagu¹

In Don Juan we find the libertine portrayed so aptly, so clearly, that we see in him what the artist wanted us to see. In every detail we thoroughly see and feel what [ Mozart] wanted us to see and feel; he lets us perceive so lucidly that we, in listening to or studying his works, exclaim time and again, “How truly has this man thought and felt!”²

This praise for Mozart’s portrayal of a sensualist comes from Mozarts Geist, a life-and-works study, from 1803. Its author, Ignaz Arnold, an organist, novelist, and popular biographer from Erfurt, Germany, used the example of Don Giovanni as a challenge to sentimental theories of genius. Mozart did not have better feelings than others, or more of them: he had a superior talent for representation.

Given that the yield of Mozart’s genius is a womanizer, murderer, and oath-breaker, Arnold’s admiration for Mozart’s craft might seem to have no ethical constraints. What counts for him is Mozart’s precision, not his propriety. Deeper into the biography, however, we are handed down a much sterner judgment on Don Giovanni and its composer. It is not a coherent work; he portrays things, like terror, that have no business on the stage; the lowly plot is unworthy of its elevated melodies. If one word could encompass the varieties of Arnold’s exasperation—the opera’s crude populism, its violence, its generic ambiguity, its sophistries, its submersion of the intellect in sensuality—that word would be “Jesuitical.”³

This was not the first time that Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment interpretation found in Mozart’s opera and the Don Juan tale more broadly some kind of clerical malignity. This body of criticism is underexplored in present-day scholarship, in part from the sense that eighteenth-century opera and spoken drama, as well as contemporary sacred and secular repertories, drifted along non-contiguous channels. The chief purpose of this essay is to give a fuller explication of what early Don Giovanni reception meant by the word “Jesuitical” and to show the place that these condemnations had in long-standing debates, conducted in the interstices of clerical and secular spheres, concerning the opportunities and dangers inherent in a sensuous stage.

Two Faces of Jesuitism in Enlightened Vienna

Clerics and the Beneficent Stage

A useful place to start is 1780, with the appearance of a pamphlet entitled Eine Bille an Joseph II. Its author was Benedict Dominic Anton Cremeri, a Austrian censor, playwright, actor, and theological polemicist active primarily in Linz, and his purpose was to honor Joseph, now sole regent of Habsburg dominions, as the genitor of a national theater.⁴ In what would be Josephine Austria’s longest, most systematic and ambitious apologia for the theater, Cremeri defended the stage along two fronts: one contesting centuries of Catholic theatrophobia, the other engaging Rousseau’s more secular critique of the stage. His project was not entirely successful, at least according to the accounts of a couple of Cremeri’s ecclesiastical peers, who condemned him as a heretic for some of the positions he staked out in Eine Bille.⁵ No less important than the arguments were the authorities that the vying parties accepted in sorting out what about the stage was of God’s kingdom and what of Joseph’s. Such is the case with the accusation that the Bille’s anthropology left no room for grace in its theory of the stage. In rebuttal, Cremeri referred to a passage there that proposed Don Quixote as the archetypal theatergoer.⁶ (Cremeri is referring to the episode in chapter 26 of book 2, where Cervantes’s hero is so enchanted in seeing the tale of Don Gaiferos and Melisendra that he attacks the wooden puppets.) In equating the ideal viewer to a beguiled Don Quixote, Cremeri had, so he says, all along been describing a stage of such power that we can “in no way arbitrarily decide for the good but instead...