Add one more to the tally of those who have written about this (in)famous number, in which Leporello gleefully enumerates Don Giovanni’s conquests. (The archaic euphemism may make us wince, but what other noun does justice both to the Don’s proclivity for sexual violence and to the catalogue’s reticulation of Europe into national territories?) It is telling that Don Giovanni outsources the tasks of both counting and recounting to his servant.Footnote 1 For Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Leporello is the epic narrator’ performing nothing less than ‘a survey of his master’s life’.Footnote 2 For Umberto Eco, conversely, the aria is ‘pragmatic’ rather than ‘poetic’ (a quality reserved for the intoning of litanies such as the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad): Leporello is no more and no less than ‘a precise bookkeeper’ whose catalogue is ‘mathematically complete’.Footnote 3
In its structural ordering of events as well as its semantic content, the aria places quantities before qualities. Framed by the music’s four-square metrical configuration, the ‘rhythmical enunciation’ of Leporello’s patter bounces around the interstices of patterns established by the chattering strings: rising 5-6 harmonic sequences and cadential formulae punctuate overdetermined exchanges between the violins and cellos that sound less dialogical than autological, as if the catalog were algorithmically generating its own contents.Footnote 4 Only subsequently does Leporello indicate that his geotagged list might be tabulated by introducing the parameters of rank, physiognomy and age as other potential means of organising its stream of raw data. In the aria’s second half, a mock-elegant minuet that closely traces the opening contours of the Larghetto from Mozart’s Quintet for Keyboard and Winds, K. 452, these qualities are amplified and refined, only to be unceremoniously flattened by Leporello’s leering envoi to the aghast Donna Elvira: ‘Non si picca – se sia ricca, / Se sia brutta, se sia bella; / Purché porti la gonnella, / Voi sapete quel che fa’ (‘It doesn’t matter if she’s rich, / Ugly, or beautiful; / If she wears a skirt, / You know what he’ll do’).
Its crude payoff notwithstanding, Leporello’s categorical exposition of feminine qualities adds multiple dimensions to the linear enumeration of the aria’s opening strains, hinting at how information can be mapped by transforming its serial patter(n) into a matrix. This process is etymologically gendered: in Heinz von Foerster’s words, pattern (derived from pater) ‘is the father whose stamp is printed across everything’, whereas matrix (derived from mater) embeds information, enabling new connections and mappings to become apprehensible.Footnote 5 At the same time, however, von Foerster deconstructs the very distinction between quantity and quality, pointing out that ‘four-ness, ten-ness, or eleven-ness’ are themselves qualities: ‘more is different’.Footnote 6
For Kierkegaard, the ‘uneven and accidental’ mille e tre has ‘an excellent quality, a lyrical recklessness’ that indexes the essential yet unrepresentable role of music in the opera as a whole.Footnote 7 It is surely no coincidence that Leporello repeats the number thrice, at once measuring and demonstrating its distance from the round 1,000. In 1780, Mozart himself had departed from the epistolatory custom of sending a thousand greetings by dispatching a grand total of 12,345,678,987,656,095 compliments to his cousin.Footnote 8 Three years previously, he had opened another letter to her with a fifty-item list of imprecations and invocations that ranges from ‘ill-treated Croats’ and ‘skunks’ to ‘buffaloes’ and ‘buffoons’.Footnote 9
While such witty performances of enumeration may have stemmed from Mozart’s desire to amuse, sexual undertones accompany even the quotidian act of counting that underpins Le nozze di Figaro’s opening number.Footnote 10 Here, Figaro is measuring the space assigned for the matrimonial bed rather than tallying notches on one of its posts, but both this duettino and the catalogue aria make music – particularly the entraining rhythms of marches and dances – complicit in amorous reckonings that are conspicuously gendered along the lines of the male gaze. In the ludic context of Mozart’s Vienna, the erotic potential of taking full measure of another’s body, and thereby quantifying its qualities, was made explicit by the flirtatious party game of calf-measuring, on account of her participation in which Mozart was sufficiently agitated to upbraid his then-fiancée Constanze in self-righteously moralising terms.Footnote 11
Lacking his own Leporello, Mozart punctiliously maintained his own catalogue, the Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke begun in 1784.Footnote 12 Mozart’s Verzeichnüß logged his musical output in a manner that might be considered alongside the groundbreaking card catalogue of the Imperial Court Library in Vienna, devised and implemented by Gottfried van Swieten (Prefect of the Library, President of the Court Commission on Education, and librettist of The Creation) in accordance with epistemological and technical principles first articulated by John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.Footnote 13 As musical Kenner and arch-archivist, van Swieten played an influential role in the preservation and organisation of materials that deepened Mozart’s acquaintance with the works of Handel and J.S. Bach, among others. It thus seems plausible that van Swieten’s example might have inspired Mozart to itemise and enumerate his own works, whether with a view to posterity or simply to enable the tabular cross-referencing of his own output in terms of genre, instrumentation, key, thematic material and date of composition – musical counterparts to Leporello’s criteria of class, physiognomy and age. Tagged with such metadata, and with Ludwig von Köchel’s Leporellian assistance, Mozart’s quantified works became qualified to enter the nineteenth-century musical marketplace. Owing to Köchel’s labours, each could assume an ontological status that, as Carl Schmitt noted, was denied the women in Leporello’s catalogue.Footnote 14 Moreover, Köchel compensated for what Schmitt identified as Leporello’s failure to ‘shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions’ – or compositions – ‘into a homogeneous continuity’.Footnote 15
Kierkegaard held the non-semantic music of the catalogue aria to trump poetic litanies even of Homeric scope:
the poet will … introduce multiplicity, and there will always be enough in it that will please, but he will never achieve the effect Mozart achieved … [Music has] the epic quality of being able to go on as long as necessary, since one can always have it begin from the beginning and listen to it again and again, simply because the universal is expressed and is expressed in the concretion of immediacy.’Footnote 16
Writing in an age before mechanical reproduction, Kierkegaard heard transcendence in repetition, the yearning of the material for the absolute. In the twentieth century, such desires were processed by techniques and technologies that became closely associated with minimalism. Francis Poulenc made a playful allusion to the catalogue aria in the first movement of his Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor (1932), throughout which neo-Mozartian textures rub shoulders with brash café-concert melodies and hypnotically repetitive passages evocative of the Balinese gamelan. But Michael Nyman’s In Re Don Giovanni (1977) takes Kierkegaard’s words at face value by turning the opening of the catalogue aria into a looping process that treats Mozart’s musical text as a point of both arrival and departure. As Carlo Cenciarelli has demonstrated, Nyman’s palimpsestic strategies invoke Terry Riley’s In C (1964), thereby positing an isomorphism between Mozart’s ‘simplicity’ and the tonal economy of minimalism: the metrical attributes of Leporello’s vocal line are transformed into the playing out of a Reichian additive rhythmic process on the trombone.Footnote 17
The radical aspect of Nyman’s appropriation lies in its absurd literalism: taken strictly at face value, the D-major elements of Mozart’s music at once prophesy and transpose Riley’s. As Cenciarelli suggests, the resultant ‘flattening’ of historical and categorical nuance reduces ‘Mozart’ to the lowest common cultural denominator. In a sense, however, such a move is in keeping with Don Giovanni’s crude reduction of all women to the animal fact of femaleness, which lays bare the sexual, political and economic grounds on which such a fact be deemed determinable. For musical works and women alike, even the most distinctive markers of individuality are liable to devolve into fungible tokens of exchange value.
As if obeying his own musical imperative, Nyman looped back to the aria once more in 2008 as part of a project commemorating the suitably arbitrary 252nd anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Throughout Profit and Loss, the minimalistic processes of In Re Don Giovanni are overlaid with harmonically congruent melodic fragments set to excerpts drawn primarily from Mozart’s letters, mostly relating to pecuniary matters, that are performed by a vocal ensemble. Blurring the distinction between the creation of art and the documentation of its circumstances, this imbrication of notes and letters takes the commodification of Mozart’s music to a new level of recursivity. Rather than standing in for additive processes of enumeration, the aria now accompanies their textual delivery: the tallying of women is explicitly supplanted by the balancing of ledgers. Nyman adheres more closely to Mozart’s structural template by dividing his piece into two contrasting sections, with the muted latter half counting the cost of the speculative and accumulative activities detailed thitherto. But if Nyman’s underlying message is that the historic and aesthetic value of Mozart’s ‘true’ music is untainted by the economic, political and sexual logic of enumeration, his medium tells a different story.Footnote 18 The contents of our catalogues refuse to be confined to the cells to which we assign them; their movements are not answerable to the tags we attach to them. In the case of Mozart no less than Don Giovanni, scores may be kept, but they ultimately remain unsettled.
