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with Leporello; in the graveyard is a statue of the late Commendatore. Giovanni is jocularly relating his recent adventures when a deep, sepulchral voice suddenly declares that they will soon end. Don Giovanni commands Leporello to ask the statue to dinner the following evening. The statue nods acceptance; to make sure, Don Giovanni repeats the invitation; the statue replies “Yes.”
The last scene is set in the banquet hall of Don Giovanni’s castle. There is beautiful music and a lavish meal. Suddenly, Donna Elvira, with whom Don Giovanni has had a prior affair, appears. Don Giovanni dismisses the musicians and his other lady friends. Donna Elvira pleads desperately with her former lover to mend his evil ways; Don Giovanni finds her pleas amusing. Donna Elvira, rebuffed, rushes toward a door. She opens it, shrieks in terror, and runs out through an opposite door. Don Giovanni goes to the door, opens it, and discovers that the statue of the Commendatore has arrived. The marble statue enters, grasps Don Giovanni’s arm, and orders him to repent; Don Giovanni stubbornly refuses. At this, the statue announces that the time has come; it pulls Don Giovanni along toward the door through which it entered. “Smoke and flames begin to develop Don Giovanni; a chorus of hollow demon voices summons him to hell, where worse agony awaits him. Don Giovanni, with a final scream, vanishes amid hellfire and smoke.”84 Now there are a number of what we might term “Freudian” elements in this opera. The initial killing of the Commendatore is an obvious Oedipal conflict, in which the old father is killed by a son-figure. The killing, and Giovanni’s sexual crimes, lead to his final damnation. Also, this opera is another example of Freud’s early preoccupation with three-layered universes: the gods above, then Earth, and Hell with damnation below. Many of the names in Mozart’s work would also have struck deep responses in Freud. The heroine’s name of “Donna Anna” would have evoked his nanny, and possibly his sister (also, eventually, his daughter). “Don Giovanni” (Don Juan) would have suggested his “cousin” John. “Leporello” is the Italian for “Lipperel,” the diminutive of “Philipp.” It is as if Mozart chose his names precisely from the Freud “family romance.” Finally, the marble man, the statue of the Commendatore, can be viewed as an expression of many of the elements that Freud found so powerfully fascinating in the statue of Moses: Both statues are, in particular, judgmental, stone father-figures. Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de ParisWhile Freud was in Paris for several months from the fall of 1885 to early 1886, studying with Charcot, he read Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame |