Facsimile of an autograph page by Mozart, from “Mozart, the story of his life as a man and artist,” 1908. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The autograph manuscript of Don Giovanni is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France under the shelfmark Ms. 1548. Eight fascicles, bound in purple. On the last sheet there is a page that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not write.
The opera opened in Prague on 29 October 1787, at the theatre of the Counts Nostitz. Mozart had composed in haste, between Vienna and Bohemia, on nine different types of paper. Alan Tyson, cataloguing the watermarks in 1992, and then Wolfgang Plath and Wolfgang Rehm in the critical commentary of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, reconstructed the path of the sheets by reading the paper: Vienna between the spring and summer of 1787 for almost everything, Prague for the coda.
The autograph is a material diary. The first thirteen sheets carry one paper, those from one hundred to one hundred and thirty-eight another. The shades of the ink change: dark brown, grey, reddish streaks, and every variation marks a day, a pen, an interruption. There are sheets left blank, torn pages, Mozart’s numbers overwritten by the librarians’. A building site.
Then, in the finale of the second act, the manuscript changes hands.
Bars 858 to 871 are on a separate sheet, number two hundred and seventy, on a paper that appears nowhere else: paler, heavier, twenty-nine by twenty-three centimetres. The ink is black. They are the last chords, the ones that close the opera after Don Giovanni has sunk. A copyist wrote them. The name is not there.
It is not the only foreign hand. For the finale of the first act, the sextet and the finale of the second, Mozart had jotted down the parts for the winds and timpani on separate sheets. When in 1799 Johann Anton André bought the manuscript from Constanze, those sheets were already scattered. The critical commentary lists them as lost. It means that the finale of the first act, the three little orchestras playing together a minuet, a contredanse and a German dance, the most famous page of the opera, reaches us without the winds Mozart had written.
Don Giovanni was not born as a monument. It was born as a show to be delivered by 29 October.
It was his way of working. In ensemble scenes he sketched the skeleton and left the rest to a copyist: the orchestration of the winds, the parts to be extracted. In a theatre with the date fixed there was no other way. Don Giovanni was not born as a monument. It was born as a show to be delivered to a company by 29 October.
The later history of the manuscript is also a chain of hands. André takes it to Offenbach. In 1855 the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot buys it in London, through the pianist Ernst Pauer, and has it bound in the purple fascicles that can be seen today. On the flyleaf of the first volume someone has written: “Don de Madame Pauline Viardot”.
When modern editors had to reconstruct the lost parts, they went looking for them in the copies: the score that came from Prague, those that came out of the Viennese workshop of Wenzel Sukowaty, the extracts Beethoven had made for himself. They compared the errors to work out who copied from whom. The text performed today in every theatre in the world is, in some places, a text that comes from copyists.
The story of the genius alone before the page belongs to the following century. In the eighteenth century music was a garden tended by many, on schemes everyone knew, and the one holding the pen was not always the composer. That Don Giovanni needed a copyist to reach the end is a scandal only for those who learned music from novels.
The watermark of sheet two hundred and seventy appears nowhere else. Whoever wrote that page left no other trace.
Sources
Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, Kritischer Bericht zu Don Giovanni (Wolfgang Plath, Wolfgang Rehm), Bärenreiter — https://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/objs/kb/pdf/020517.pdf
Alan Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, Harvard University Press
IMSLP, Don Giovanni K. 527 — https://imslp.org/wiki/Don_Giovanni,_K.527_(Mozart,_Wolfgang_Amadeus)