(Pamplona, 1948)
Doctor of Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid and in Arts and Humanities from the Paris I-Sorbonne University. Professor on leave of absence from the University of the Basque Country and the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council. Anagrama Essay Prize 1995, Euskadi Prize for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1997, Spanish National Essay Prize 2000. He is currently Vice-President of Jakiunde, Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
“Voices, masks and music of evil: Don Giovanni…”
Music, when allied to other arts, investigates evil better than philosophy, whose traditional moralistic bias persists, and detracts from it. According to Wagner (Opera and Drama), Baroque opera emerged as a complete art because it combined poetry and music. Mozart and Da Ponte went beyond good and evil in their Don Giovanni because they succeeded in integrating six fine arts into one drama, which continues to be reborn in cinema and in today’s digital screen theatres. That dramma giocoso explored evil in depth because it integrated voices, masks, bodies, stages, polyphonies and even polyrhythms in the same harmonic and contradictory tempo. The proclamation “Long live freedom!” is followed by the minuet. Pure baroque. In the final rendezvous between life and death, no one laments.