Preface

Summary

This study was undertaken during a period of study leave awarded to me by Queen's University Belfast in 2007. In support of the project, I have received grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of John Irving and Mark Everist in obtaining these. I am grateful to staff in the following libraries for their help: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna); Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Bibliothek der Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (Salzburg); Moravské Zemské Museum (Brno); Badische Landesbibliothek (Karlsruhe); Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Vienna); Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietsky (Hamburg); Württembergische Landesbibliothek (Stuttgart); Zentralbibliothek (Zurich); Beethoven Archiv (Bonn); Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv (Graz); Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek (Fulda); Stadtbibliothek (Winterthur); Zentralbibliothek (Lucerne); Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg (Frankfurt am Main); Juilliard School of Music (New York). I have received a most hospitable welcome from Hans Ernst Weidinger, Michael Hüttler, Johannes Schweitzer and other colleagues at the Don Juan Archiv (Vienna), whenever visiting to study this excellent collection of Don Giovanni materials.

The philological analysis of the early manuscript copies constitutes a significant lacuna in the existing scholarship of Mozart's operas. In my study of Così fan tutte I focused on the autograph and its secrets, but also made use of around twenty or so eighteenth-century copies to uncover aspects of its early performance history. Detailed analysis of patterns of error transmission and layout enabled me to propose a sequence of revisions through which the opera went during the composer's lifetime. Similar techniques are used in the present study which aims to refine our knowledge of the Vienna Don Giovanni, perhaps still the least well understood of any of Mozart's major operatic revisions. This will lead on to a consideration of how the late-eighteenth century came to terms with the existence of the newly composed music. The picture that will emerge from this wider study is at odds with the received view, which (to exaggerate slightly) continues to see the work in two discrete, precisely definable texts, each sanctioned by the composer alone: an authentic Prague version; and an authentic Vienna version. In reality Don Giovanni won its place at the heart of European culture in a pragmatic world in which hybrid versions flourished to the exclusion of these ‘purer’ originals.