Why I admire Casanova

When I tell my friends and colleagues that I admire Casanova, they all assume that it is his reputation as a seducer that I have in mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. Giacomo Casanova was indeed the most notorious lover the Western world has ever known, but this is not why I find him so fascinating. What intrigues me most about this mercurial character is his approach to life in general, his appetite for adventures of all sorts, and the delight he takes in all sorts of company, male and female, young and old.
Born in Venice in 1725, the son of two actors, everything about his life was theatrical. By turns a priest, soldier, violin player, doctor, conman, gambler, and prisoner, he played these and many more parts in his drama, which is essentially a tragicomedy.
Comedy dominates the first act, as Casanova journeys incessantly around Europe and beyond, charming everyone he meets with his wit and erudition. In Istanbul, a wealthy Turk becomes so fond of him that he offers Casanova his daughter’s hand in marriage. Back in Venice, a senator adopts him as his own son. Not long after, in Paris, the aging playwright Crebillon teaches him to write the classical French in which Casanova will later pen his memoirs. Also evident in these early years is Casanova’s appetite for risk. His fortunes rise and fall and then rise again, almost as quickly as his overactive member. In a few mad days at the Ridotto casino in Venice in 1753, he loses 5000 sequins at cards. He soon recoups his losses, only to lose everything again a few months later. Imprisoned in the Doge’s palace, he makes a daring escape across the rooftops, the story of which spreads like wildfire among the chattering classes of every European capital. Compared to the snakes and ladders of Casanova’s life, everyone else’s existence seems like a mere chequerboard across which we plod safely and boringly a few squares at a time, with nothing to ruin us and nothing to exalt us.
The tragedy of Casanova — or perhaps pathos is a better word — comes as he ages without achieving the recognition he dreamt of. Having longed all his life to be feted as a man of letters, it gradually dawns on him as old age approaches, that he has failed. Some of his literary projects meet with limited success, but never the widespread acclaim he wishes for, and his most ambitious project — a utopian fantasy in the style of Gulliver’s Travels — flops when it is published in Prague in 1788. Banished from his beloved Venice, eking out his last decade as Count Waldstein’s private librarian in a remote corner of Hungary, Casanova is forced to write, in the end, not for fame or glory, but merely to keep up his spirits; “the reader will forgive me,” he writes in the penultimate volume of his autobiography, “when he learns that writing my memoirs was the sole remedy I believed I possessed to avoid going mad or dying of sorrow.”
It is only then, as he begins to sketch out the autobiography he had said he would never write, that Casanova finally pens the book that will win him the literary renown he had sought in vain for so long — though this recognition only comes posthumously, since the memoir remains — at twelve volumes — unfinished at the time of his death in 1798. The man who emerges from these pages is far from the one-dimensional lothario which his name now evokes, as Mozart discovered when writing Don Giovanni in 1787. Who better, thought the composer, than the legendary Casanova, to serve as inspiration for an opera about the great fictional seducer? But when Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte consulted Casanova, the elderly adventurer surprised his fellow Venetian by reacting in horror at the comparison with Don Juan. Far from collecting notches on his bedpost, an attitude which da Ponte satirises so hilariously in the famous “catalogue aria,” Casanova claims to see each woman as unique. As Johnny Depp explains, in his reprise of the role in Don Juan de Marco, it was only this ability to see the particular beauty in each woman he met that enabled Casanova to succeed where other men had failed. This is what I admire about Casanova — not the number of his conquests, but the fact that they came to him as a by-product of something completely innocent — a talent for finding something attractive in almost everyone he met.
