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Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni
Opera by W. A. Mozart
Max Slevogt - Der Sänger Francisco d'Andrade als Don Giovanni in Mozarts Oper - Google Art Project.jpg
Portrait of Francisco D'Andrade in the title role by Max Slevogt, 1912
Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte
Language Italian
Premiere 29 October 1787 (1787-10-29)
Estates Theatre, Prague

Don Giovanni (Italian pronunciation: [dɔn dʒoˈvanni]; K. 527; complete title: Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, literally The Rake Punished, namely Don Giovanni or The Libertine Punished) is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It is based on the legends of Don Juan, a fictional libertine and seducer. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the National Theater (of Bohemia), now called the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787. Da Ponte's libretto was billed as a dramma giocoso, a common designation of its time that denotes a mixing of serious and comic action. Mozart entered the work into his catalogue as an opera buffa. Although sometimes classified as comic, it blends comedy, melodrama and supernatural elements.

A staple of the standard operatic repertoire, Don Giovanni for the five seasons 2011/12 through 2015/16 was ninth on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide. It has also proved a fruitful subject for writers and philosophers.

The opera was commissioned as a result of the overwhelming success of Mozart's trip to Prague in January and February 1787. The subject matter may have been chosen in consideration of the long history of Don Juan operas in Prague; the genre of eighteenth-century Don Juan opera originated in Prague.

The libretto of Lorenzo Da Ponte was based closely on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati for the opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, first performed in Venice early in 1787, although he was loath to admit this in memoirs written decades later. Some of the most important elements that he copied were the idea of opening the drama with the murder of the Commendatore (in earlier dramas, this incident always appeared somewhere in the middle), and the lack of a specification of Seville as the setting, which had had been customary in the tradition of Don Juan dramas since the appearance of the prototype Don Juan drama El burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina, written in the early 17th century. For Bertati, the setting was Villena, Spain, whereas Da Ponte's libretto only specifies a "city in Spain".


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