MOZART, Wolfgang Amadeus 1756-1791

Il Dissoluto Punito osia Il Don Giovanni Dramma giocoso in due Atti posto in Musica ... in Partitura / Don Juan oder Der Steinererne Gast lomische Oper in zwey Aufzügen in Musik gesezt ... Mit unterlegtem deutschen Texte nebst sämmtlichen von dem Komponisten später eingelegten Stücken. In Partitur. [Erste - Zweyter Akt]. [Full score]. [KV 527]

Lipsia ... Leipzig: Breitkopf e Härtel ... Breitkopf- und Hartelschen Musikhandlung, [1801].

2 volumes. Oblong folio. Modern quarter burgundy morocco with matching marbled boards, black leather title labels gilt to spine.

Vol. I
1f. (recto: title in Italian with large vignette engraved by Bolt after Kinninger depicting the characters Commendatore and Don Giovanni in the supper scene, verso blank), 1f. (recto title to the first act in German, verso cast list), xiv (libretto), [i] (index of numbers), 6-292 pp.

Vol. II
[293] (title to the second act in German), 294-530, [531] (Anhang), [532] (blank), 533-590 pp.

Typeset throughout. Text in Italian and German; text to libretto in German only.

Some minor foxing and browning; handstamp in purple ink and penciled bibliographical annotation of the Viennese Mozart collector Josef Zehetgruber (1935-2001) to blank upper outer corner of title to Act II. Lacking publisher's green printed wrappers.

First Edition, with the scarce separately-printed libretto bound in, often not present. Haberkamp pp. 295-97, plates 253-58. Hirsch, II, 645; Hoboken 11, 341. Fuld, p. 371. RISM M4502.

The German text of the libretto is a translation by the German critic and writer, Friedrich Rochlitz (1769-1842). "His German text of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1801) was retained as the standard version in Germany for longer than any other contemporary translation." Horst Leuchtmann revised by James Deaville in Grove Music Online

First performed on 29 October 1797 in Prague, "[Don Giovanni] was the second operatic collaboration of Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, who, some fifteen months earlier, had had a great success with their Le nozze di Figaro. Their third and last opera together was to be Così fan tutte. This triumvirate of masterworks has earned them their current reputation as one of the world's greatest opera-writing teams." Zaslaw and Cowdery p. 61

"Don Giovanni is governed by a single idea, Giovanni’s flouting of society in pursuit of sexual pleasure, which binds together a disparate set of ambivalent or comic incidents. The libretto has been unfairly criticized; its episodic nature is a condition of the subject, in which respect it differs from Figaro and Così. Divine retribution appears like an act of God, or a different kind of life-force personified in the statue; what in previous treatments had been comic, perfunctory or merely gruesome, is raised to sublimity by Mozart’s music." Julian Rushton in Grove Music Online

An exceptionally attractive copy.

Item #39459

Price: $12,000.00  other currencies