Don Juan

Variations on a Theme

John Smeed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000357387
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

First published in 1990, Don Juan: Variations on a Theme explores the differing perceptions of this famous character following his first appearance on the European stage in the early seventeenth century.

The book concentrates on the ways in which perceptions of Don Juan's character have altered in response to changes in social and moral values. It examines famous Don Juan works, including those by Moliere, Byron, Pushkin, Shaw, Anouilh, and Max Frisch, and relates them to these changing views. It also looks at a variety of other plays, poems, and novels on this theme, and highlights the important role of music in Don Juan's history. The book concludes with a consideration of Don Juan's lasting popularity and whether it has run its course.

Don Juan: Variations on a Theme will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of Don Juan, comparative literature, and European literature.

1

The Beginnings

El Burlador de Sevilla, written by a monk, Gabriel Téllez, under the pen-name of Tirso de Molina and first published in Barcelona in 1630, is the earliest complete surviving play on the subject of Don Juan Tenorio.¹ It does not appear to have had an actual person as its model, although it may well have aimed at a generalized portrait of a contemporary type, that of the rich and unscrupulous libertine. What is clear is the author’s didactic intention: Don Juan’s fate is to serve as an awful warning. To convey his message in compellingly dramatic terms, Tirso grafted his depiction of the hardened reprobate on to an old legend, transmitted in the form of popular verse-romances, in which a reckless sinner invites a dead man (or his head, or his statue) to a banquet.² Tirso’s play is the source, direct or indirect, of virtually all subsequent works devoted to Don Juan, helping to establish both the hero’s ruling characteristics and the general pattern of dramatic events.

The work begins with Don Juan’s seduction of Isabela, achieved through the ruse of pretending to be her betrothed, Don Octavio. Don Juan escapes. We presently find him shipwrecked on the shores of Taragona, where he seduces a fisher-girl, Tisbea. We move to Seville, where Don Juan, again by means of impersonation, attempts the seduction of Doha Ana, whose outcry brings her father, Don Gonzalo, hurrying to the scene. The two men fight and Gonzalo is killed. After a further seduction scene, the victim this time being Aminta, a country girl, we find Don Juan and his servant, Catalinón, back in Seville. They come across the statue of Don Gonzalo, whereupon Don Juan recklessly invites his victim (or the effigy of his victim) to supper. The Statue duly appears and issues a counter-invitation which Don Juan, as a ‘man of honour’, accepts. This final meeting takes place in a chapel: the table is black, the servants too are shrouded in black, scorpions and vipers are the food, the wine is bitter … Don Juan, having consistently refused to repent until the very last minute when it is too late, is dragged off to Hell. In a final scene, Catalinón gives an account of his master’s end to the other characters.

Tirso’s Don Juan is an insatiable womanizer who relies on deceit as much as on charm or persuasion. Indeed, the title of the play means ‘the Trickster of Seville’. In a famous passage of self-analysis, he says: ‘Seville calls me the trickster and my greatest pleasure is to deceive a woman and destroy her honour.’³ He has some positive features: a high degree of reckless courage, a sense of honour (patchy and selective, it must be admitted) and a pride that will not allow him to do anything that would deny or besmirch his own image of himself. Thus both honour and pride make him accept the Statue’s invitation. But the limits of this code of honour are very clearly shown in the episode in which he impersonates the Marquis de la Mota in order to pursue Ana. He receives a letter intended for his friend Mota and promises, as a nobleman, to deliver it faithfully. But, scenting an adventure, he reads it, deceives Mota and keeps the assignation himself. Yet later, apparently with perfect sincerity, he assures the Statue that he will keep his word and appear at supper – again, because he is a nobleman and man of honour! An aside of Catalinón’s gives us the key: Don Juan may be a nobleman, but one would do well not to trust him where women are concerned (ii, 161 if.). But it was less the inconsistency of Don Juan’s conduct than his wickedness that concerned Tirso. Don Juan is blasphemous and sinful, although not an atheist (this trait will be introduced in later versions). He is that much commoner type: a loose-living and inveterate procrastinator who persuades himself that he can delay repentance in order to enjoy his libertinism for a little longer. This idea of delayed repentance runs like a leitmotif through the play.

What happens is this: whenever Don Juan is urged to repent or is reminded that God’s wrath may one day be visited on him, he replies with his favourite remark, ‘Qué largo me lo fiáis!’ or a close variant of it, ‘Tan largo me lo fiáis?’ or ‘Tan largo me lo guardáis.’ The phrases mean ‘How much time you are granting me!’ or ‘are you granting me?’, as if a debtor were talking of the day on which a debt will fall due – but the creditor in this case is God and the debt Don Juan’s weight of sin. We hear the phrase when Catalinón warns his master that deceit and seduction will one day be punished with death and again when Tisbea hints at the dire consequences of breaking a vow. Don Juan even uses it in a monologue to reassure himself that retribution, if it is to come, is still in the distant future. It may be added that, in the first supper scene, a chorus of spirits echoes the phrase, thus mockingly recalling Don Juan’s false and impious feelings of security. The monetary image is exactly right for this calculating sinner and probably helps to give the work a much wider application than the lurid career of one sensationally debauched individual might otherwise possess.

Don Juan is accompanied on his adventures by his servant, Catalinón, who is an earthy and commonsensical character, sharing neither the vices nor the virtue (that is, the heedless courage) of his master. He prefers safety and good food and drink to hazardous escapades, is good-hearted, feels pity for Don Juan’s victims and occasionally remonstrates with his master. His terror when the Statue appears at the supper-table contrasts with Don Juan’s defiance. There is no doubt that the characterization of both servant and master was in part dictated by the author’s didactic intentions. The figure of Don Juan shows how wickedness and the failure to heed repeated warnings are finally punished; he is a solemn reminder to sinners that they should repent betimes. In the servant we have a fundamentally decent and godfearing ‘ordinary man’ whose very ordinariness allows him to survive where his master’s arrogance ensures downfall. Even Catalinon’s fear is more sensible – if less impressive in a superficial way – than his master’s bravado; for who should not show terror when Retribution walks miraculously abroad?⁴

The two main characters, then, are already established in many essentials in this first Don Juan play, although each was to undergo important developments and alterations. In the remaining decades of the seventeenth century, Don Juan would become notably more wicked, while his servant would all too often develop into a purely comic character. Important elements in the plot of Tirso’s play will persist, giving work after work a recognizable shape and structure, involving the seduction or attempted seduction of a high-born lady by means of impersonation, the wooing of a fisher-girl or peasant beauty, the duel, the Statue, the call to repentance, the invitation to supper and the descent into Hell. The closing scene, in which the servant, having witnessed his master’s end, gives an account of this to the other characters, thus allowing them to comment on the libertine’s punishment and to reveal their own plans for the future, rounds off the play both morally and dramatically and hence appealed to numerous later authors. The use made by da Ponte of this opportunity will be commented on later.

Tirso’s play, of course, not only has a double invitation (from Don Juan to the Statue and from the Statue to Don Juan); it also includes two banquets. There has been much debate as to how this came about and whether it makes for an untidy and formally unsatisfactory ending. I am inclined to agree with Daniel Rogers⁵ that it makes perfect sense and produces a symmetry that is more than merely structural. For Don Juan’s invitation is to an earthly repast, in keeping with his worldly and hedonistic way of life, while the second meal scene, with its alarming and gruesome emblems of death and torment, leads to that other world which Don Juan has up till now tried to ignore. But many subsequent treatments of the legend have preferred the greater economy of one supper scene only; Don Juan invites the Statue, who thereupon appears and abruptly transforms the would-be festivity into a Judgment.

In the most general terms, it is easy to see the fascination, for both authors and audiences, of the Don Juan figure and of the legend dealing with his exploits and punishment as presented by Tirso. Those who have talked dismissively of the play as a supernatural extravaganza with a ‘monkish’ moral told at best only half the story. In addition, the events have dramatic force, variety and rapid movement towards an inexorable conclusion. They possess a clear shape and sequence which later authors can vary and modify ad lib. As a character, Don Juan both fascinates and appals; most audiences will probably have had an ambivalent attitude towards him, enjoying his unscrupulous ruses yet finding comfort in the thought that, at the end, divine justice is meted out to him. It is very unlikely that Tirso intended any such mixed response – but equally unlikely that a character who seemed merely sinful and shocking would have fathered such progeny and created such a lasting vogue.

From Spain the Don Juan theme quickly passed to Italy. The first extant play is Il Convitato di Pietra by J. A. Cicognini, probably dating from the 1640s. In its action, this play is a slightly slimmed-down version of El Burlador, although there are important differences both of detail and characterization. The central figure, here as in subsequent Italian versions called Don Giovanni, is represented as much more wicked than his Spanish prototype, retaining that character’s audacious courage but lacking the gallantry and aristocratic nobility of manner which had helped to make the Spaniard at least superficially attractive.⁶ He is now both more arrogant in general and more callous towards his victims. But the most significant difference is that he shows no readiness to repent, even at the very end:

Statue	Don Giovanni, give me your hand!
D.G.	Here it is. Oh God, what am I grasping!
Statue	Repent, Don Giovanni!
D.G.	Let go, I say. Alas!
Statue	Repent, Don Giovanni!
D.G.	Oh! I am dying. Help!
Statue	Repent, Don Giovanni!

Here D.G. falls headlong and is lost from view.

(Act 3 Scene 8)

Meanwhile the servant, here called Passarino, has moved much nearer to the traditional notion of the comic servant. He still occasionally acts as a warning voice to his master, but the contrast between them (which, as we have seen, served a serious didactic purpose in Tirso) is taken to an extreme which threatens any serious impact that the play might otherwise have, let alone any moral significance. Thus, for instance, Passarino’s terror is egregious and comic to a degree which destroys the important point made in El Burlador about the common man’s understandable and proper fear of the Statue. Nor does Passarino show any of the pity for the betrayed women that moved Catalinón. Moreover, Cicognini’s play is full of comic business for this servant-clown, even in scenes of great potential dramatic seriousness.

One can go further: there are whole scenes whose only discernible raison d’être is to furnish Passarino with opportunities for comic dialogue and tricks (lazzi). Thus the basic structure has changed somewhat in the course of the move from Spain to Italy. Tirso’s work is held together by the didactic contrast between the sinful daring of the master and the conventionally ‘safe’ attitudes of the servant: in Cicognini, in so far as one can talk of a unifying principle, this is a sort of dramatic counterpoint between the serious action (Don Giovanni’s crimes and punishment) and his servant’s lazzi, which can often jar in their context. This radical bifurcation into melodrama and clowning will persist and become even more drastic in some later treatments of the Don Juan theme.

As far as the plot of Cicognini’s play is concerned, there are a number of innovations which will add significantly to the stock of dramatic events on which later writers will be able to draw. One such is the list of Don Giovanni’s conquests (some hundreds of names) kept by his servant;⁷ this, of course, will lead to Leporello’s famous catalogue-aria in Mozart/da Ponte. It is also in Cicognini that the Statue nods in acceptance of the invitation to supper; this too will provide a wonderful moment in Mozart’s opera. Other motifs introduced by Cicognini and gratefully taken up by later writers include Passarino’s fear that his outstanding wages will not be paid now that his master has gone to Hell (Act 3 Scene 9) and the Statue’s lofty refusal of earthly meats when it (he?) appears at Don Giovanni’s supper table (‘Non ha bisogno di cibi terrini’, Act 3 Scene 5: this will recur almost verbatim in da Ponte’s libretto).

Of these incidents, the servant’s catalogue is by far the most important. For actually to show Don Juan achieving conquest after conquest would be aesthetically intolerable and probably indecent, as well as being virtually unstageable from a purely practical point of view. Dramatists and librettists have had to content themselves with a handful of episodes, one of which involved the killing of the lady’s father and thus helped to bring about Don Juan’s sensational punishment, while at least one other incident figured a humble girl. Thus two essential points were made: Don Juan was shown as lusting after women from all ranks of society and as sowing the seeds of his own ruin even as he ruined others. But an equally essential ingredient – Don Juan as a mass seducer, as one who made a career out of philandering – could not be dramatized. The servant’s catalogue provided a way out of this undoubted dilemma.

All critics of the play and all chroniclers of the Don Juan legend known to me have compared Cicognini unfavourably with Tirso. At the very least, one must say that the virtual transformation of Tirso’s Catalinon into a clown created a trap for future dramatists and librettists, an obvious opportunity for easy laughs, but at the cost of true dramatic, moral and psychological tension. There were certainly other Italian Don Giovanni plays from this period which have failed to survive, including one by Giliberto. From these Italian pieces, one line of development goes via seventeenth-century French theatre into popular stage- and puppet-plays, while another line leads to Italian opera. In both cases, the improvised Italian comedy of the day, the commedia dell’arte, played a part.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Don Juan theme had been taken into the repertoire of the commedia. Although much in this highly popular theatrical tradition depended on improvisation within stock situations and conventions, we can gain a good general idea of what these Don Giovanni (or Don Juan) plays were like. The Don Juan comedy quickly spread to France from Italy and we are fortunate in having scenarios relating to versions played in both countries. A scenario does not, of course, furnish details of all the comic business or give the actual words spoken. The comic set-pieces (lazzi) would have been to some extent improvised around an agreed situation or idea; the text was not learnt and delivered word for word and certainly not written down. But from these surviving scenarios, it is clear that the commedia versions owe much to Tirso, either via Cicognini or through an indebtedne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Beginnings
• 2 Don Giovanni; The Opera by da Ponte and Mozart and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s interpretation of it
• 3 Byron
• 4 Hoffmann’s Influence
• 5 Reactions Against the Romanticized Don Juan
• 6 Links with Faust
• 7 The Mañara Story; Zorrilla; Two Contrasting Russian Don Juans
• 8 The ‘Sporting’ Don Juan; The Conquest of Remorse; Don Juan and the Philosophers; Don Juanism as a Vocation
• 9 Don Juan as a Type
• 10 The Legendary Framework; An Aid or a Pitfall?
• 11 Richard Strauss and Don Juan
• 12 Conclusion
• Original Versions of Passages Quoted in Translation
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index