Civilization and Its Discontents in Mozart's Don Giovanni & Verdi's Rigoletto

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men.

The operas of Mozart and Verdi have long been among the most beloved in the repertory. While the manifest content of these operas reflects sociocultural realities of other times and places, they have endured not only because of their musical beauty and dramatic strength, but also because they encompass emotional dynamics that transcend time and place. Like other 18th- and 19th-century opera composers, Mozart and Verdi were responding creatively to the enduring issues of love, sex, and power, as well as the difficulties of living within the civilized cultural frameworks of their times and dealing with the broader existential challenges of life. Their operas beautifully exemplify, dramatize, and highlight many of the emotional issues that take center stage in clinical work, and it is in this spirit that I offer some reflections on Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) and Verdi's Rigoletto (1851).

In putting an opera “on-the-couch” there are several possible angles of approach. The first is to treat the opera as a creative expression of the artist's unconscious dynamics, and to examine it with the aim of developing a psychobiography of neurotic concerns and conflict. Such an approach follows a venerable tradition begun by Freud in his analysis of numerous works of art and literature (1910a, 1911, 1914, 1928). A second approach is to treat the opera as if the characters were real people with individual inner lives that we analyze as if they were on the couch. A third approach assumes that the opera consists of “crystallized condensations of complex, over-determined, and enduring emo