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Add one more to the tally of those who have written about this (in)famous number, in which Leporello gleefully enumerates Don Giovanni's conquests. (The archaic euphemism may make us wince, but what other noun does justice both to the Don's proclivity for sexual violence and to the catalogue's reticulation of Europe into national territories?) It is telling that Don Giovanni outsources the tasks of both counting and recounting to his servant.1For Søren Kierkegaard, 'Leporello is the epic narrator' performing nothing less than 'a survey of his master's life'.2For Umberto Eco, conversely, the aria is 'pragmatic' rather than 'poetic' (a quality reserved for the intoning of litanies such as the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad): Leporello is no more and no less than 'a precise bookkeeper' whose catalogue is 'mathematically complete'.3
In its structural ordering of events as well as its semantic content, the aria places quantities before qualities. Framed by the music's four-square metrical configuration, the 'rhythmical enunciation' of Leporello's patter bounces around the interstices of patterns established by the chattering strings: rising 5-6 harmonic sequences and cadential formulae punctuate overdetermined exchanges between the violins and cellos that sound less dialogical than autological, as if the catalog were algorithmically generating its own contents.4Only subsequently does Leporello indicate that his geotagged list might be tabulated by introducing the parameters of rank, physiognomy and age as other potential means of organising its stream of raw data. In the aria's second half, a mock-elegant minuet that closely traces the opening contours of the Larghetto from Mozart's Quintet for Keyboard and Winds, K. 452, these qualities are amplified and refined, only to be unceremoniously flattened by Leporello's leering envoi to the aghast Donna Elvira: 'Non si picca - se sia ricca, / Se sia brutta, se sia bella; / Purché porti la gonnella, / Voi sapete quel che fa' ('It doesn't matter if she's rich, / Ugly, or beautiful; / If she wears a skirt, / You know what he'll do').
Its crude payoff notwithstanding, Leporello's categorical exposition of feminine qualities adds multiple dimensions to the linear enumeration of the aria's opening strains, hinting at how information can be mapped by transforming its serial patter(n) into a matrix. This process...