Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni uses ravishing musical effects to make its listeners take delight in dreadful events. The moral ambiguity of this move has divided critics from Beethoven to Kierkegaard. This essay employs the theology of Karl Barth to achieve a fuller understanding of the opera, especially drawing on Barth’s essay on the absolutist humanism of the eighteenth century in his book Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. The role which Mozart’s music plays in the opera is analogous to the patience with which God permits his rebellious human creation to have its day, a patience which itself can appear weak and indulgent even though it is the form of God’s almighty providence.
Author: Fred Sanders
Fred Sanders is associate professor of theology in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. His undergraduate training was in drawing and printmaking, after which he earned an MDiv from Asbury Theological Seminary. His doctorate is from the Graduate Theological Union.
His publications include The Image of the Immanent Trinity: Rahner's Rule and the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (NY: Peter Lang, 2005), and numerous articles on the doctrine of the Trinity. He also wrote and illustrated four volumes of theological comic books, Dr. Doctrine's Christian Comix (InterVarsity Press, 1999).