five of these performances between 1835 and 1838 .Although other works
by Mozart competed for Kierkegaard’s attention—he heardTheMagicFlute
for the first time on January 26, 1837—it wasDon Giovannithat really
captured his imagination, and from the mid-1830s until the completion of
Either/Orthe journals teem with entries concerning the great seducer.
But Kierkegaard was far from alone in his passion .The times were com-
posed in the key of Mozart, and the young university student was merely
in tune with the times .In a journal entry dated June 10, 1836—when he
wrote of a pharmacist who ground his medicine, of a girl scrubbing in the
courtyard, where there was also a stableboy grooming his horse and cleaning
his currycomb by knocking it on the stones—it was not a mere accident
that the itinerant musician who played his reed flute in a nearby courtyard
“was piping the minuet fromDon Giovanni.” It was a summer’s day in
Copenhagen, rather late in the morning, everything so eternally simple,
“and I felt so fine.”
In a report from 1839, on the other hand, the situation was quite dishar-
monious: “In some respects I can say of Don Giovanni what Elvira says to
him: ‘You are the murderer of my happiness.’ For truly, this is the play
which has seized hold of me so diabolically that I can never again forget
it—it was this play that drove me, like Elvira, out of the quiet night of
the cloister.” And this was the play that Kierkegaard would subject to an
intellectual-historical analysis in the first part ofEither/Or, endowing it with
a dramatic and psychological depth that neither Mozart nor the librettist da
Ponte would have granted their own work .In his analysis Kierkegaard imi-
tated the music with such linguistic genius that Don Giovanni himself looms
over us, emerging from the rhetoric: “Hear his life begin .As the lightning
uncoils from the darkness of the thundercloud, he bursts forth from the
depths of seriousness, faster than the speed of lightning, less steady yet just
as sure .Hear how he plunges into the multiplicity of life, how he dashes
himself against its solid barriers .Hear the lightly dancing violin notes .Hear
the intimation of joy .Hear the jubilation of pleasure .Hear the festive bliss
of enjoyment .Hear his wild flight .He surpasses himself, always faster, never
stopping .Hear the unbridled desire of passion; hear the sighing of love;
hear the whisper of temptation; hear the maelstrom of seduction; hear the
stillness of the moment: Hear, hear, hear, Mozart’sDonGiovanni!”
Reading Binge
In the mid-1830s Kierkegaard engaged in a period of bingeing or boozing
that led him far afield both from the demands of the theological discipline
and from the straight and narrow path of virtue .This is the generally re-