“Madamina, il catalogo è questo” from Don Giovanni (1787)

Don Giovanni, serial seducer and heartless libertine, is bad news for any woman who crosses his path. In this case, in the´first act of Mozart’s opera, the woman is Donna Elvira who, having been abandoned by Giovanni in Burgos, has come to seek him out in Seville. He, resourceful as ever, makes his escape and leaves his long-suffering servant Leporello to do the talking – which he does by detailing the conquests in his master’s extensive catalogue: 640 in Italy, 230 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey but in Spain 1003. This is not what Elvira wants to hear, of course, and the second part of the aria, an ironically graceful minuet in which Leporello describes Giovanni special tastes, is no consolation.