Don Ottavio: Supportive or Selfish?

by Amy Hill Schaffer ‘09

Themes of deception and insincerity are at the heart of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. One character who rarely gets accused of such motivations, however, is Don Ottavio. But is Don Ottavio truly a devoted, caring fiancé, trying his best to console Donna Anna and help her through her time of grief? Or is he as self-centered as the rest, concerned with shielding himself from his fiancée’s grief by trying to make her repress it—or even worse, putting his own comfort above her trauma and her need for time and space?

Don Ottavio certainly attempts to offer his comfort and support to Donna Anna many times over the course of the opera. But what are his motivations and intentions? His first attempts to help her (”My soul, console yourself!”1) after they discover her father’s body is immediately rebuffed with “Flee, cruel one, and let me die also!” Instead of acknowledging her pain and her mourning for her father, Don Ottavio attempts to make her focus on him: “Listen, my love, listen! Look at me for a moment! Your true love is speaking, the one who lives only for you.” He tries to reassure Donna Anna that she has “both a husband and father in me.” When she pleads for him to swear revenge, he will not swear by her father’s blood, but by “your eyes, and our love.”

Perhaps these actions could be seen as merely misguided: he wishes desperately to console her, but doesn’t know how, and so attempts to distract her instead of helping her face her grief. Certainly this awkwardness and wish to avoid facing the truth is something that many people do when faced with another’s misfortune. His actions as the opera goes on, however, gradually reveal that his main concern is not Donna Anna’s emotions and feelings, but his own.

In his aria “Dalla sua pace,” he reveals, “My peace depends on her peace. What gives her pleasure gives me life, and what gives her sorrow gives me death.” In the recitative before Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he even goes so far as to accuse her of being cruel for delaying the wedding until she has properly mourned her father (and, although this is not explicitly stated, recovered emotionally from Don Giovanni’s attack). These are not the words and actions of one who understands and supports his love’s emotions – although his eventual consent to wait a year, as Donna Anna requests, is a promising start.

Countless opera directors and critics have painted Donna Anna as a cold woman, one who does not (or cannot) return Don Ottavio’s love, and perhaps one who is contemplating (or even carrying out) an affair with Don Giovanni while still attempting to retain the security of her relationship with Don Ottavio. Don Ottavio, in turn, is read as a comically self-deceiving cuckhold,2 perhaps even sexually impotent.3 Even Liane Curtis, in her wonderful essay on the problems of glorified sexual assault in Don Giovanni, suggests that Donna Anna has “simply emotionally outgrown Ottavio.”

Such interpretations ignore the fact that any apparent distance on Donna Anna’s part is a perfectly normal reaction for a woman who has just survived an attempted rape by someone disguised as her fiancé, who has just lost her father to that very attacker, and whose beloved fiancé will not allow her to mourn for even a single day because it makes him uncomfortable. Our desire to read Don Ottavio as a sympathetic and supportive figure, the only such male character in the opera other than the Commendatore, distracts us from his selfish behavior.

This article is the second in a series about Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The first is “Feminist Readings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.”

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[after "console yourself" in the 2nd paragraph] 1. Translations from the Italian are my own. A complete Italian libretto is available online from Karadar Classical Music [url=http://www.karadar.it/Librettos/mozart_don_giovanni.html].

[after "self-deceiving cuckhold" in the 2nd-to-last para.] 2. See, for example, the interpretation of “Dalla sua pace” [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPXaOq-dpDA&feature=player_profilepage] from a 2008 performance of Don Giovanni at the Salzburger Festspiele, directed by Claus Guth.

[after "sexually impotent," right after n. 2] 3. Christopher Ballantine, “Social and Philosophical Outlook in Mozart’s Operas,” The Musical Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 2 (Oct. 1981): 518.

[after "emotionally outgrown Ottavio," right at the end of the 2nd to last para.] 4. Liane Curtis, “Sexual Politics of Teaching Mozart’s Don Giovanni,” NWSA Journal Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2000): 128.

Tags: Amy Hill Schaffer, Feminism, Mozart, music