The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera

Edited by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz

July, 2008
Paper, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13755-3
$24.50 / £14.50

Cloth, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13754-6
$43.50 / £25.50

"[This] new volume enriches the flourishing field of opera studies both within and beyond German studies." — Kevin S. Amidon, German Studies Review

"One marvels at how Don Giovanni ranges over the thought and culture of the nineteenth century and its aftermath... [and] applauds the editors." — Edmund J. Goehring, Current Musicology

"The Don Giovanni Moment is the book for readers who have had enough of the discussion of who Mozart really was, and who want to understand the music's impact on the intellect and, more widely, its influence on Western culture." — Alex Ross, New Yorker

"Kierkegaard said that Mozart's Don Giovanni is absolutely musical; this superb collection shows that it is absolutely historical as well. History, like music, rides the inexorability of time, greeting the future while being both enriched and inhibited by the ghosts and statues of the past. Goehr and Herwitz set the stage with an intellectual panache worthy of Donna Anna and Don Giovanni themselves, and the ensuing voices never impede the energy that makes Mozart and his Don Giovanni one of modernity's most subversive pairs." — Michael P. Steinberg, director, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University

"Power, seduction, and moral judgment are the determining tropes of this remarkable collection of essays parsing the deeply conflicted social and aesthetic modernity of Don Giovanni. The opera’s complicated reception history, from the early-nineteenth-century to the late twentieth, is addressed by an impressive list of both young and senior scholars from the domains of musicology, history, literary studies, and in particular philosophy and aesthetics. The book convincingly demonstrates why this extraordinary opera has provoked so much thought on the often dystopian state of the modern subject and directly or indirectly provoked the concerns of later composers such as Wagner and Strauss." — Richard Leppert, Samuel Russell Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of Minnesota

Related Subjects

• Aesthetics
• Music

Series

• Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

About the Author

Lydia Goehr is professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. Daniel Herwitz is the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of Humanities and director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption, and his short stories have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

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