DON GIOVANNI: DREAM OR REALITY
Compiled by Tito Capobianco

“The universal Don Juan (Don Giovanni) goes about the world like a shadow, followed by a constellation of women,” de Musset.

The following are excerpts from declarations made by Don Juan’s admirers, detractors, critics, and analysts, amongst them: Ramiro de Maeztu, Gregorio Maranon, Gonzalo R.L. La Fora, Gendarme de Bevotte, Corpus Barga, Tirso de Molina, Said Armesto, Nestor Jujan, Gonzalo T. Ballester, Ortega y Gasset, Mandolino, Julio Gamba, Moliere, Lord Bryon, Eugenio d’Ors, Charles Baudelaire, Lenau, de Musset, Anouilh, Hayeen, Carlo Goldoni, Alexander Pushkin, George Bernard Shaw, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Prosper Merimee, and Zorilla.

Name: Juan, Don Juan, Don Giovanni, Sir John, Always Don Juan.

Surname: Tenorio, Salazar, de Salamanca, and many more.

Place of Birth: Spain, Italy, France, North, South. Don Juan is a citizen of the world. He is a myth; he has never existed nor does he exist. He is a literary creation descendent from traditions and romances. He is a vital reality, Spanish, handsome, an imposing figure…for some a healing metaphor. He was born from the creative fantasies of men and women who dream, desire, but cannot attain. This phantom of our nocturnal fancies . . . Don Juan was born to literature during the reign of Philip IV of Spain.

Age: 34 or 40 or . . . .

Marital Status: Single, or perhaps once married.

Hair: Black, sometimes graying or sometimes blond.

Nose: Prominent. Some describe it as Roman, some say Greek. Always with a sharp sense of smell. Don Juan boasts he can smell women before he sees them.

Mouth: Sensual, refined, mocking, and always lying.

Height: Tall, medium, thin, and robust.

Eyes: Black, brown, blue, green, and sometimes gray.

Religious Affiliation: Atheist, ambivalent, an old Christian.

Address: Unknown…yet everyone knows it.

Profession: Seducer, gambler, user, mocker of women, and, above all, a rebel.

Sex: Masculine, effeminate, with insatiable sexual appetite. He is not just a sexual man, but sex itself within a man.

Don Juan is the most perfect man ever seen, both in body and spirit. He is handsome, daring, courageous, strong, and a master lover. He is arrogant, young, agile, virile, erotic, elegant, lithe and of resonant voice. He is a liar, a flirt, a rake, unfaithful in friendship, a gambler, a rebel against everything, a narcissist, and a ruffian without intelligence. He knows neither shame nor honor.

The Don Juan of the northern countries is the romantic. The Spanish Don Juan is the seducer. He is a mocking fantasy, a well-known and beloved hero. The Spanish Don Juan does not look for happiness, but for the pleasure of the moment. He is not romantic, but a haughty and sensual being. Love for him is a war without mercy for the conquered; after the conquest is made, escape from the scene is his honor. His motto is “Me and my senses.” He is consumed by the keeping of statistics of his conquests. He pursues women but does not fall in love; he is a libertine, yet he does not become dissipated; he is wasteful but does not go to ruin; he knows nothing about social and religious obligations, and he is always the proud nobleman of ancient and Christian lineage. He is instinct rather than law, strength rather than authority, whim over reason. He is the most universal of literary creations, a product of the imagination.

The first embryonic Don Juan was the Count Leoncio in a play performed by the Jesuits of lgolstadt in 1615.

For many in Spain, Don Juan is an exotic import, void of national relevance or tradition. For others, Don Juan is the only Spanish hero that Europe has made her own. Don Juan possesses an immature instinct, adolescent, and dilatory before feminine attraction. He loves women but is incapable of loving a woman. For Don Juan, once the woman has succumbed, the most important thing is to abandon her. Women, for him, are merely the means to sex.

Not because he was, but rather because he could not be a Don Juan, did Mozart choose to deify him.

NOTES ON THE OPERA
by Mona Seghatoleslami

Don Giovanni was the second collaboration between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered in Prague in 1787, and performances in Vienna followed in 1788. Don Giovanni, like the other Mozart-Da Ponte works, is fundamentally a comic opera, but one with serious elements. All of Mozart and Da Ponte's comedies contain unsettling overtones, but they are most blatant in Don Giovanni. This work has been treated more seriously because of the gravity of the assault and murder that open the opera, and because of Giovanni’s damnation at the end.

Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni share the interplay of serious and comic operatic characters. Several of these characters conform rather strictly to type, while others are in between, combining serious and comic elements. Character type helps define the identity of the various roles; what is more, the manipulation of identity and the use of disguises play an important part in the interplay of characters. In this opera, many of the characters engage in some form of disguise, but Giovanni changes his identity most often and most successfully.

In trying to hide his crime from the other characters, Giovanni first plays the role of the helpful friend to Anna and Ottavio. Once his guilt is discovered, he must then literally disguise himself as his servant Leporello. This gambit also helps him avoid the affections of Elvira, play a trick on her, and torment Masetto. Giovanni can also musically change his tone and tune to manipulate the women he wishes to seduce, as he does in “La ci darem la mano” when winning over Zerlina.

Elvira is described as a noblewoman, and, like Giovanni, she is neither a fully serious nor fully comic character. But Elvira is not really able to control her varying status as a character and use it to her advantage as Giovanni does. No matter how seriously Elvira takes herself, Mozart lets the audience know that she is a bit ridiculous, through her arias. “Fuggi il traditor” is old-fashioned, similar to an aria from Handel’s operas. The incongruous musical style makes her statements seem overly dramatic and her character less believable. Her earnestness is also undermined by interruptions of her outpourings; for example, those of Giovanni and Leporello during her first aria, “Ah chi mi dice mai.”

The other characters, more closely bound to their character types, undergo less significant changes even when they try to disguise themselves. Leporello, a purely buffa character, often speaks to the audience and provides perspective on the action while trying to keep from becoming too involved. Even when he is disguised as his master, Leporello cannot change his identity. He continues to make comments to the audience as Elvira serenades him, believing him to be Giovanni.

Anna and Ottavio wear masks when they attend the celebration at the end of the first act (as does Elvira), but they do not fundamentally change character. Zerlina pretends to be what she is not when she is led away from Masetto by Don Giovanni and joins him in the contradanse. Giovanni’s attentions, and her pretensions to marrying a more noble suitor, temporarily elevate her above her place—musically, as well, as she dances a type of dance above her station.
The essential comic nature of the opera persists into the famous climactic scene. Giovanni’s confrontation with the Stone Guest and his descent into hell are a spectacle, gleefully demonic and terrifying, rather than a morally instructive or deeply tragic ending. As in the rest of the opera, Leporello continues to make humorous comments. While the statue calls Giovanni to his fate, Leporello tries to claim that Giovanni is too busy to answer the statue’s demands.
In the end, Giovanni does not, or cannot, pretend to be other than he is. He boldly accepts the Commendatore’s hand and does not repent, despite being faced with damnation. This lack of compromise can be interpreted (and often has been) as making Don Giovanni a tragic or noble hero. Or is this simply another disguise? Giovanni affects the role of the bold and unconcerned cavalier. He hides his fear of the statue and plays his part, even as it leads him to hell.