The Earl of Harewood writes: ""Don Giovanni" is too full of arias, many of them famous, for its own dramatic good. Perhaps it is a problem with most eighteenth-century opera. Singers demanded them, the public expected them; and of course the aria ... is a potent operatic weapon, the moment for the composer to comment in depth on the drama he has set going. But ... arias hold up the action in a way it is sometimes hard to defend, because you feel it was the singer who wanted it so."