Posted on 03/14/2025 7:45:17 AM PDT by Antoninus
During Lent, I usually attempt to limit my consumption of secular entertainment and shift over to works with more overt Catholic themes. With this in mind, I noticed a video pop up on my YouTube feed of a work that had long been familiar to me, but that I had never troubled myself to watch in its entirety.
This was a production of Mozart’s great opera, Don Giovanni.
Full disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of opera generally, select Gilbert and Sullivan works notwithstanding. Some of the extended Prima Donna arias can really get under my skin.
In the case of Don Giovanni, however, I was willing to put those prejudices aside.
But wait. How can an opera full of humorous scenes about a complete profligate womanizing scoundrel and his many romantic conquests be Catholic? Well, I’m glad you asked.
I decided on the 1954 production by Salzburger Festspiele, with Cesare Siepi in the lead role, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting. When I set up the video to watch with my kids, I asked them whether they thought the opera would be a tragedy or a comedy based on Mozart’s music. Listening to the first few minutes of the overture, they thought it sounded very much like a tragedy. But then, inexplicably, the music transitions into something light-hearted. So by the time the singing began, my teens and 20-somethings weren’t really sure which direction things were going to go.
I suspect that’s what Mozart intended. As the opera progresses, we see Don Giovanni, a nobleman living in very Catholic 17th century Spain, behaving like a heathen, particularly with regard to the fair sex. He attempts rape. He murders the victim’s father. He denounces, insults, betrays and abandons his wife, Donna Elvira. He attempts to seduce a bride on her wedding day. His behavior is so awful that a posse of his victims and their protectors seeks to hunt him down and kill him—without success.
Mozart's accompanying score seems to make light of the main character's crimes. Similarly, the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte—an ordained Catholic priest whose eventful life sounds more like that of Don Giovanni than Don Bosco — approaches the above litany of evil deeds with a certain casual humor. Indeed, one of the most famous scenes features Don Giovanni’s lackey, the buffoonish Leporello, reciting the numbers of women his rakish padrone had seduced in various countries, finishing his recitation with a count of the Spanish ladies, declaring emphatically: “mille e tre!” — 1,003.
But even though Don Giovanni's sins against Donna Elvira are awful and grave, she is of a mind to forgive her wayward husband. She wishes that he would reform his life and come back to her. She feels genuine pity for him, but her hopes are continually disappointed. Even in the last scene, she comes to plead with him to reform himself, saying: “I want that you change your life!”
But Don Giovanni cannot, for life to him are wine, feasting, and seduction. He mocks Elvira and she departs in tearful frustration, but not before seeing something terrifying at Don Giovanni’s door.
In a previous scene, Don Giovanni and Leporello had jokingly invited the funerary statue of one of the nobleman’s victims, the slain Commendatore, to visit them for supper. At the base of the statue had been inscribed: “Of the wicked man who bereaved me of life, I wait here for revenge.” To everyone’s shock, the statue of the Commendatore has now arrived at Don Giovanni’s door to sup.
But strangely, the animated statue has not come to strike down Don Giovanni himself—but to give him a choice, a final chance. The statue offers an invitation to Don Giovanni: Will he sup with him? Despite Leporello’s urging against it, Don Giovanni will not succumb to fear. Indeed, it has never been said of him that he was afraid. He is too proud. He will accept the statue’s invitation.
But when he grasps the statue’s hand and feels his life ebbing away, even then Don Giovanni is too proud to repent. “Repent!” the statue commands three times. Three times, Don Giovanni says “No!” But this finally, is too much. Whereas his myriad of previous grave sins would have been forgiven, Don Giovanni is now guilty of the worst sin. The ultimate sin. The unforgivable sin.
Final impenitence.
There can be only one path from this point forward. The statues cries: “There is no more time!” Immediately, flames appear. Ghastly creatures appear. Demonic beings appear. Don Giovanni is seized and brought to hell amidst a Mozartian blast of music in the suitably terrifying key of D minor.
It is worth considering that both Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte were Catholics, though certainly imperfect ones. In Da Ponte’s case, he was a fallen priest who, at the time he wrote the libretto for Don Giovanni, had fathered several children out of wedlock. Mozart himself, though devoutly Catholic in many areas of his life, was also a Free Mason.
Both da Ponte and Mozart would have been very familiar with the teaching of the Church on final impenitence. This teaching is drawn from the early Church Fathers who considered final impenitence to be the sin against the Holy Spirit mentioned by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:
“Therefore I say to you: Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but the blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven. And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come.” [Matthew 12:31-32]
Saint Augustine of Hippo summarizes the teaching as follows:
“For by the Holy Spirit, by whom the people of God are gathered together into one, is the unclean spirit who is divided against himself cast out. Against this gratuitous gift, against this grace of God, does the impenitent heart speak. This impenitence then is the blasphemy of the Spirit, which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.….But this impenitence or impenitent heart may not be pronounced upon, as long as a man lives in the flesh.” [Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 21 on the New Testament, Chapters 19-21]
Don Giovanni, in his final act, final minutes and seconds on the stage, steadfastly refuses to repent, even when he feels his own dissolution at hand. Is it his love of pleasurable sins that drives him to this point? No, it is not. It is only his pride. For truly it is written: “Pride goeth before destruction.” [Proverbs 16:18]
Portrait of Lorenzo Da Ponte as an elderly man in America by Samuel Morse. From the frontispiece of the 1929 edition of his Memoirs.
As a somewhat ironic point of emphasis, let’s revisit the strange meandering life of Don Giovanni’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, in light of the above teaching.
Da Ponte would eventually leave Europe and settle in America with his wife, Nancy Grahl, in 1805. He spent the remaining 30-odd years of his life on a variety of ventures, from opening a bookstore, writing poetry, and building an opera house in New York City, to serving as a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. He wrote an extensive memoir of his life, the 1929 edition of which includes the following note at the end:
“Early in 1831, Da P. had sent some of his poems and a letter [to his one-time academic colleague, Monsignor Jacopo Monico, who was at this time, Patriarch of Venice]; and the Patriarch had replied with great deference, expressing, among other good wishes, the hope that Da P. ‘might someday settle his affairs that his last moments should not be embittered by any trace of remorse.’ Da P. now sent the Patriarch the “Sonnets to Ann” with assurances that ‘the holy counsel and Christian good wishes’ of that ‘foremost pillar of the portals of the Church of Christ,’ ‘had produced in his soul the effects desired by such a charitable heart.' That was why, seven years later, sensing the approach of death, he felt free to summon the Rev. John MacCloskey, future Bishop of Albany, to his bedside that he might make confession and receive absolution at the hands of the Church.” [Memoirs of Lorenzo da Ponte, p. 491]
So it seems that the librettist of Don Giovanni eventually proved himself a better Christian gentleman than his own rakish character.
When presented with the command: “Pentiti!” he responded, “Sì!”
The Holy Spirit is the indwelling conscience implanted in man, imprinted by God, and the rejection or disowning of this Spirit is the unforgivable sin, because it is not an infirmity borne of human fleshly weaknesses, like other sins are, but a calculated and willful rejection of the primary lever of salvation.
another interesting fact about Lorenzo da Ponte. He was the mentor/guardian of young Daniel Sickles of New York, who went on to infamy by murdering Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key) in 1859 and later becoming a “political” Major General in the US Civil War who almost lost the Battle of Gettysburg through his ineptitude.
IMHO, another aspect of the “Sins against the Holy Spirit” is the reality that the sinner does not acknowledge certain acts to be sins at all. In that case, repentance isn’t possible so forgiveness isn’t possible either.
There is no question that rejecting the Holy Spirit is the unforgivable sin.
The scriptures around the one cited are equally applicable to people today. Many people claim to know Jesus and cast out spirits in His name, but He does not know them. Their hearts are cold and closed to Love, even though they proclaim that Jesus is their Savior.
I just posted a comment quoting Matthew 12:31 recently as it is very important. Probably one of the most important scriptures in the Bible.
“The Unpardonable Sin
31 “Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 32 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.”
It is the Holy Spirit that cleanses a person’s soul. Repentance and Confession are empty if a person rejects the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is what connects Jesus to Our Father and Jesus to us.
Several years ago I was with a 97 year old woman who was dying. She started crying and I asked her why. She replied that she was afraid that she was going to hell.
I prayed beside her for many hours, but the portal to Heaven did not open up for her to cross over to Heaven. I kept praying every day for many hours each day, with no success.
I noticed that her body radiated heat like a furnace and asked the hospice nurse why that was happening. She felt it too. She added that the woman has no infection or physical reason for the heat, in fact the woman did not even have a fever.
For three weeks I continued daily prayer with her. I noticed a golden swirling Light around her that got brighter with each passing day. It was like liquid Light that was all around her. She did not eat once in the three weeks and did not drink for the last week of her life.
Finally, on Friday of week three, the portal to Heaven opened up and she crossed over to Heaven.
What I realized then was that the Golden Light I saw around her was the Holy Spirit. It was not as bight as the Light of Heaven, so she was not afraid of it. For three weeks the Holy Spirit cleansed her soul of all the guilt and fear, replacing it with Love. The Holy Spirit is what actually does the work.
The heat radiating from her body was the process of the Holy Spirit transmuting and removing fear. It’s the reason that a prayerful blessing to an evil person is like placing hot coals upon their head. People who hold onto sin are afraid of the Light of Heaven as the are told by satan that the Light will kill them.
It is the same Holy Spirit that fills the room and encapsulates an evil spirit during an exorcism. They are afraid of it and try to flee. I ask in prayer for the Light to surround them, and they scream, bark, yell and hiss at me, trying to scare me. However, when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, the Love casts out all fear and it is impossible to experience fear.
Even Communion is worthless without the Holy Spirit as it is empty.
A person experiences hell if they hold onto sin and try to approach God. It’s like putting a dense object in the high frequency of a microwave as it causes it to heat up and often catch on fire.
The weeds being burned in Matthew 13 at harvest are in response to the increased presence of the Holy Spirit coming to earth full force in the final days. As it says in the Lord’s Prayer, “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” So it will be soon.
Catholic ping!
Yep...It's always a nice break from politics and critiques of religious denominations etc..
Looked up this Da Ponte guy...He also wrote the book for The Marriage of Figaro; and he was a close friend of Mozart and Casanova, according to to the Wiki...
I’m convinced that the final scene of DG is all winking tongue in cheek. Nothing really happens to the wicked. Mozart’s freemason sympathies are much in evidence in the Don’s celebration of “Liberta”. It’s a great opera, but I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. I don’t have much patience left for cynical, worldly liberalism.
Yup. He was also the first Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia University. Fascinating character.
I agree with that. Until man takes his final breath there is hope for salvation, imo. Interestingly, I read a book an elderly lady friend possessed. In it were accounts of persons on their death beds and their actions in their final moments. Some were filled with peace knowing they were going home to the Father. Some were filled with repentance and made confessions in their final moments finding peace with the Father. And some in fear tried to reach out to the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness but there seemed to be some obstacle to receiving grace and forgiveness. Frankly, it was terrifying to me to read that some sinner in their final minutes on earth would not be able to be redeemed. I’ve always wondered if they had grieved the Holy Spirit one time too many. Turning away from Him and seeking their own will. The most tragic thing I can imagine is Jesus saying, “Depart from me. I never knew you.”
Interesting anecdote. Are you a Catholic priest, by chance?
.
Free choice is a seriousi decision. Always consequences, considered or likely not.
No. I am Christian. I grew up Lutheran. But don’t categorize myself as being Catholic or Protestant.
I’ve spent time at Benedictine and Carmelite Monasteries, but also at Hindu and Buddhist temples.
My religion is about my experiential relationship with my Savior Jesus, and I accept the Bible as the truthful word of God.
No. I am Christian. I grew up Lutheran. But don’t categorize myself as being Catholic or Protestant.
I’ve spent time at Benedictine and Carmelite Monasteries, but also at Hindu and Buddhist temples.
My religion is about my experiential relationship with my Savior Jesus, and I accept the Bible as the truthful word of God.
Agree...Mozart would have been an interesting pal, but Casanova would have been “gangbusters”.
I’ve seen three productions of DG. The one I found most convincing and true to Mozart’s spirit had Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Donna Elvira, and Leporello come downstage all the way to the footlights and deliver the moral straight through the fourth wall, in a way that sent the message “what you just saw here never really happens. The rich and powerful get away with it every time. This moral ending is given for the sake of convention, but nobody’s fooled, least of all you, dear audience. We have been having a little ironic fun, and we know you All get it.” All this came upon me as a shock, completely unexpected, but it worked so well and seemed so true to the jaded/sophisticated milieu in which the opera was first produced, that I sensed at once that this was just the way the ending was meant to be received. Otherwise, what would be the point? A morality play for the hyper-sophisticated enlightenment scoffers? Would they not have found that trite and patronizing? Please. It’s all a big joke.
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