Prague, October 29, 1787
I have heard music that stopped me before. Bach in Leipzig. Certain late Monteverdi. But what happened in the Nostitz Theatre tonight is something I am still attempting to locate in my memory for comparison and finding nothing adequate.
Don Giovanni. Mozart’s opera, premiered tonight before an audience that was quieter than I have heard a Prague audience in thirty years of passing through this city. They understood before the curtain fell. A man who takes what he wants, who denies nothing and regrets nothing, who finally meets the stone guest and goes down into fire rather than repent. The audience sat with their hands in their laps during the final scene and no one coughed.
I have known men like Giovanni. I have outlived all of them. The particular freedom they claim, the freedom of appetite without consequence, always ends the same way: not with a stone statue coming to supper, but with disease, with a knife, with the ordinary weight of a life built on nothing durable. Mozart knew this. He was thirty-one years old and he knew this the way some people know things before the evidence arrives.
I sat in the middle of the house. Mozart was in the theatre. I did not introduce myself. There are encounters that are better kept at the distance of the music itself. What passes between composer and audience in a room like this does not need to be spoken. He will be dead in four years. The counterpoint already knows it.