Don Giovanni “Madamina, il catalogo è questo”

“Madamina, il catalogo è questo” is a famous bass aria in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This aria is very comical and the music is cleverly composed to musically depict the women described in the song.

Leporello, Don Giovanni’s servant, is proudly exclaiming his master’s catalogue of women in order to dissuade Donna Elvira (a victim of these conquests) from pursuing after this womanizer. The aria has two main thematic sections: the first states the (ridiculous) number of women that Don Giovanni has conquered in various countries, and the second thoroughly describes the many women on this list both in personality and physical aspect.

The accompaniment in the first half of the aria is very fast paced with groups of eighth notes mostly in the right hand and simple chords and arpeggios (and sometimes eight not groupings) in the left hand. The melody of this section is monosyllabic and rhythmically driven. He breaks this fast-paced rhythmic theme at the end of the first section when he begins to list the physical characteristics of the women using sustained half notes, which leads into the next section.

The second section is slower and is monosyllabic and in some instances polysyllabic. The theme of this last half of the aria is the descriptions of the women Don Giovanni prefers and seeks. Mozart utilizes excellent word painting in this section. He juxtaposes two distinct types of women by their physicality–big and tiny. These two physical descriptions are emphasized by a contrast in note values in the music. The big, tall women are paired with longer notes (quarter and half), and the tiny, short women are expressed using melodic lines of sixteenth notes.

Overall, this aria is not only repulsively funny through the lyrics, but also engaging through the music. I especially enjoy the performance by Ferruccio Furlanetto (Leporello) and Solveig Kringelborn (Donna Elvira) in The Met’s production of this opera in 2000 with the famous cast of Bryn Terfel as Don Giovanni and Renee Fleming as Donna Anna.