Don Juan is one of the permanent, traditional types of character; and Mozart’s music sympathetically, instinctively, rather than with any conscious philosophical purpose, brings out the essence of it. The gay gallant, magnetic disturber of every woman’s peace that comes within his sphere, is not intended for that vulgar sensualist, that swaggering street-rake, which caricatures the part in most performances we may have seen. The true conception of Mozart’s Don Juan is that of a gentleman, to say the least, and more than that, a man of genius; a being, naturally full of glorious passion, large sympathies, and irrepressible energies; noble in mind, in person, and in fortune; a large, imposing, generous, fascinating creature. Dramatically he is made a little more than human, yet in a purely human direction. He is such as we all are, “only more so,” to borrow an expressive vulgarism. Remarkably is he such as Mozart himself was. He is a sort of ideal impersonation of two qualities, or springs of character, raised as it were to the highest power, projected into supernatural dimensions—which is only the poet’s and musician’s way of truly recognizing the element of infinity in every passion of the human soul, since not one ever finds its perfect satisfaction. Mozart in his own life knew them too well, these two springs or sources of excitement! They are: (1.) the genial temperament, the exquisite zest of pleasure, the sensibility to every charm and harmony of sense, amounting to enthusiasm, and content with nothing short of ecstasy; that appetite for outward beauty, which lends such a voluptuous, Titian coloring to his music. And (2.) as the crowning enthusiasm of the young, fresh soul, as the highest mortal foretaste of celestial bliss, the sentiment of sexual love—that sentiment which is the key-note of every opera. In Mozart, music appears as the peculiar native language of these passions, these experiences. His music is all fond sensibility, pure tranquillity of rapture, and most luxurious harmony of soul and sense; and therefore in him we have the finest development of the dramatic element in music. The two together make the genuine Giovanni creed—the creed of Mozart and of Music—the natural creed and religion of joy. This free and perfect luxury of passion and fruition, Mozart imagines raised (as we have said) to the highest power, in the hero of the old tradition. His Don Juan is a grand believer in the passions and in pleasure; he is the splendid champion and Titan of that side of the problem of life, a superb vindicator of the senses. He stands before us in the glorious recklessness of self-assertion and protests against the soul-and-passion-starving conventionality, the one-sided, frigid spiritualism of an artificial, priest-ridden, Mammon-worshiping society; opposing to those meshes of restraint his own intense consciousness of being, (with a blind instinct that it is good, divine at bottom, and only needing to appear in its own natural language of a Mozart’s music to prove this;) strong in the faith, against the world, that Joy, Joy is the true condition and true sign of life; but blindly seeking to realize this in the ecstatic lawlessness of love, which necessarily involves sooner or later a proportional reaction of the outraged Law and Wisdom of the Universe.
Excessive love of pleasure, helped by a rare magnetism of character, and provoked by the suppressive moralism of the times, have engendered in him a reckless, roving, insatiable appetite, which each intrigue excites and disappoints, until the very passion in which so many souls are first taught the feeling of the Infinite, becomes a fiend in his breast and drives him to a devilish love of power that exults over woman’s ruin, or rather, that does not mind how many hearts and homes fall victims to his unqualified assertion of the everywhere rejected and snubbed faith in Passion. The buoyant impulse, generous and good in the first instance, goes on thus undoubtingly, defying bounds, till it becomes pure willfulness, and the first flush of youth and nobleness is hardening to Satanic features. The beauty and the loveliness of woman have lost to him now all their sacredness; they are mere fuel to the boundless ambition of a passion which knows no delight beyond the brief excitement of intrigue and sensual indulgence. He becomes the impersonation and supernatural genius of one of the holiest springs of human sentiment perverted, because denied; and he roams the earth a beautiful, terrible, resistless, fallen angel, and victim after victim are quaffed up by his hot breath of all-devouring passion. And so he perseveres until Hell claims its own in the awful consummation of the supper scene. Art could not choose a theme more fraught with meaning and with interest. It is still the old theme and under-current of Opera: the Body and the Soul;[[5]] the Liberty of passion, unmeet for its own guidance, in conflict with the Law, intensely narrowed down by social custom from God’s great law of universal harmony.
The character of Don Juan, thus conceived, this splendid embodiment of the free, perfect, unmisgiving luxury of sense and passion, would be no character at all, but only an absurdity, an impossibility in the spoken drama. There is no prose about it; nothing literal and sober; take away the exaltation, the rhythmical nature of it, and it falls entirely to the ground. Only Music could conceive and treat it; Music, which is the language of the ideal, innermost, potential life, and not of the actual life. But music equally does justice to both sides of the fact. In this triumphant career of passion, inasmuch as it is among men and laws and sympathies and social customs, a fearful retribution is foreshadowed. But not in him, not in this Titan of the senses, this projected imagination of unlimited enjoyment and communion. It is through the music that the shuddering presentiment continually creeps. Through music, which in acknowledging the error, in laying bare the fatal discord, at the same time symbolizes its resolution. Through music, in whose vocabulary sin and suffering and punishment are never final; in whose vivid coloring the great doom itself is but a vista into endless depths of harmony and peace and unexclusive bliss beyond.
The splendid sinner’s end is rather melodramatic in the opera; and yet there is a poetic and a moral truth in it; and the spectre of the Commendatore is a creation fully up to Shakspeare. No man ever literally came to that; but many have come to dread it. Beings, as we are, so full of energies and of exhaustless passional promptings to all sorts of union and acquaintance with the rest of being; urged, just in proportion to the quantity of life in us, to seek most intimate relationship all round, materially and spiritually, we dread the mad excess of our own pent up forces. Surrounded by set formulas; denied free channels corresponding to our innate tendencies and callings; plagued by traditions, and chafed by some social discipline, in which the soul sees nothing it can understand, except it be the holy principle of Order in the abstract, do we not often start to see what radicalism lurks in every genuine spring of life or passion, in everything spontaneous and lovable? Who, more than the pleasure-loving, sympathy-seeking, generous, child-like, glorious, imaginative, sensitive, ecstatic, sad Mozart, would be apt to shudder in dreams, in the night solitudes of his over-worked, and feverish and wakeful brain, before the colossal shadow of what possibly he might become through excess of the very qualities that made him diviner than common mortals? This allegory can certainly be traced through “Don Giovanni.” The old governor or commander, whom he kills, personates the Law. The cold, relentless marble statue, that stalks with thundering foot-fall into the middle of his solitary orgies alter him, is the stern embodiment of custom and convention, which he defies to the end, and boldly grasps the proffered stony hand, from an impulse stronger than his terrors.
It is an old Middle-Age Catholic story. Under many forms it had been dramatized and poetized as a warning to sinners, before Da Ponte[[6]] found it so much to the purpose of Mozart, when he wanted to do his best in an opera composed expressly for his dear and own peculiar public at Prague. Coarse as the story seems, perhaps the conflict between good and evil in the human soul was never represented in a better type. It was for Mozart’s music to show that. That in adopting it for music he had any metaphysical idea at all about it, there is no need of supposing. His instinct found in it fine sphere for all his many moods of passion and of music. Here he could display all his universality of musical culture, and his Shaksperian universality of mind. Genius does its work first; the theory of it is what an appreciating, philosophical observer must detect in it when done. “They builded better than they knew.” Love, if it was the ruling sentiment of Mozart’s nature, was for that very reason his chief danger. If it was almost his religion and taught his soul its own infinite capacity, so also seemed the danger therefrom infinite, raising presentiments and visions of some supernatural abyss of ruin, yawning to receive the gay superstructure of man’s volatile enjoyments here in time. Life, power, love, pleasure, crime, futurity and judgment—and a faith left beyond that!—what dream more natural, what circle of keys more obvious to modulation, to a soul, whose strings are all attuned to love and melody, whose genius is a powerful demon waiting on its will, and whose present destiny is cast here in a world so false and out of tune that, to so strong a nature, there seems no alternative besides wild excess upon the one hand, or a barren sublimity of self-denial on the other.
In this old legend the worldly and the supernatural pass most naturally into one another. Don Juan, gifted with all the physical and intellectual attributes of power, urged by aspirations blind but uncontainable, full of the feeling of life, and resolved to LIVE, if possible, so fully as to fill all with himself and never own a limit, (and this is only a perversion of the true desire to live in harmony with all,) finds the tempting shadow of this satisfaction in the love of woman, and the poor bird flutters charmed and trembling toward his fascinating glance. Imagine now the elegant, full-blooded, rich, accomplished and seductive gallant on his restless rout of pleasures and intrigues. At his side his faithful knave, droll Leporello, expostulating with his master very piously sometimes, yet bound to him by potent magnetism, both of metal and of character (for passion like Giovanni’s will be served.) Leporello is the foil and shadow to his master, and adds to the zest of his life-long intoxication by the blending of the comic with this exquisite wild fever of the blood. Throughout the whole he plays the part of contrast and brings all back to reality and earth again, lest the history should take too serious possession of us. He is the make-weight of common sense tossed into the lighter scale. He justifies its original title of “Don Giovanni, un drama giocoso;” for this opera is tragedy and comedy and what you please, the same heterogeneous yet harmonious compound that life itself is. He on the one side gives a dash of charlatanry to Don Juan, just as on the other side he borders on the supernatural. Mark the poetic balance and completeness here: this passion-life of Don Juan has its outward and its inward comment: on the one side Leporello, on the other the supernatural statue and the bodily influx of hell. On the one side it is comic, grotesque and absurd; on the other, it is fearful. Seen in one light he is a charlatan, a splendid joke; seen in the other, he is an unfolding demon and a type of doom; while in his life he is but the free development of human passion in human circumstances. Man always walks between these two mirrors! One shows his shadow, as of destiny, projected, ever-widening, into the Infinite, where it grows vague and fearful. The other takes him in the act, and literally pins down all his high strivings and pretensions to such mere matter of fact, that he becomes ridiculous.
We come now to the Opera itself, which we can only examine very briefly and unequally, touching here and there. Were we to set about it thoroughly, our article would soon overflow all magazine bounds, since there is not a scene, an air, a bit of recitative, from the beginning to the end, that would not challenge our most critical appreciation.
And first the Overture, composed, they say, in the single night before the first public performance of the opera in Prague; his wife keeping him awake to his work by punch and anecdotes and fairy tales, that made him laugh till the tears ran down his cheeks; and only ready for the orchestra (which had not its equal in all Europe) to play at sight without rehearsal. He may have written it that night, that is to say, have copied it out of his head. It was his habit of composition; his musical conceptions shaped themselves whole in his brain, and were carried about there for days until the convenient time to put them upon paper; and it is not possible that his brain that time could have been without an overture, since there the opera existed as a perfect whole, and in that glowing and creative mood, the instrumental theme and preface to the same must have floated before him as naturally as the anticipation of his audience. Moreover, the first movement of it, the Andante, is essentially the same music with the grand and awful finale of the opera, and is properly put first in the overture (whose office it is to prepare the hearer’s mind) as the grand end and moral of the piece. Accordingly it opens with three stern, startling crashes on the chord of D minor, the sub-bass dividing the measure into equal halves, but the upper parts syncopated; then a pause, and then the same repeated in the Dommant—like the announcement of a power not to be trifled with. Then a series of wild modulations, full of terror, enhanced by the unearthly brass and low reed tones, surging through chromatic intervals, which make the blood creep, and presently overtopped by a pleading melody of the first violins, while a low, feeble whimper of the second violins is heard all the time like the moaning of the wind about an old house. Then alternate sharp calls and low, tremulous pauses; the ground quakes; the din becomes more fearful; the melody begins to traverse up and down all kinds of scales, through intervals continually shifting, and expressive of all manner of uncertainty, like the quick and fruitless runs in all directions of a beast surrounded by the hunters. It is like the breaking up of the familiar foundations of things, that unsettling of the musical Scale!—All this is brief, for it is but a synopsis and foreshadowing of the last scene in the opera. The string instruments then dash off, in the major of the key, into a wild, reckless kind of Allegro, than which there could not be a better musical correspondence of the general subject, that is, of the restless, mischievous career of one outraging all the social instincts and defying all pursuit. This spends itself at leisure, softening at the close toward the genial F natural, the key of nature and the senses, where the overture is merged into the dramatic introduction.
The curtain rises. Scene, a garden in Spain. Time, just before daybreak. Leporello, cloaked, with a lantern, paces watchfully to and fro before a noble villa, and sings with heavy bass of his drudgeries and dangers in the service of his graceless master; kindling half seriously at the thought how fine a thing it would be to play the gallant and the gentleman himself. The light and exquisite accompaniment of the instruments meanwhile is like the softness of a summer night, and seems to count the moments of pleasure. The dreams of the valet are soon disturbed. Don Juan, his face hid by his mantle, rushes from the house, struggling from the grasp of Donna Anna, who, pale and disheveled, clings to him convulsively, and seeks to detain and to discover the bold, mysterious man, who has dared thus to invade her privacy and her honor. Her hurried and accusing melody, in these snatches of recitative, is full of a dignity and a pure and lofty fire that characterize alike her person and the whole music of her port. With drawn sword in one hand, and a torch in the other, her old father, the Commendatore (commander of a religious order) rushes out and challenges the bravo, who deals him a death-thrust. The startlingly vivid orchestral picture, which accompanies and as it were guides these sword thrusts, is followed by a slow, mournful trio of bass voices, in which are gloomily contrasted the scornful triumph of Don Juan, the dying wail and warning of the old man, and the comic terror of Leporello. Nothing could be more thrillingly impressive; that music could mean nothing else but death stalking suddenly into the very midst of life! Then comes the passionate outpouring of the daughter’s grief, and that inimitable scene of the most musical as well as most dramatic dialogue in the whole range of the lyric drama. It is the perfection of recitative. What exquisite tenderness and sincerity of sorrow in that violin figure which accompanies her inquiry for her father, (padre mio,) when she first recovers from her swoon! How sweet and comforting that fall of the seventh, where Ottavio tells her: Hai sposo e padre in me (Thou hast husband and father in me!) And how fiery and grand the passage where she inspires the tame lover with that sublimely solemn oath of revenge, and the hot, scouring blast of their swift and wonderful duett which follows it. In all this there is no delicate touch of feeling, no spiritual token of great passion and great purpose, possible to voice or instruments, omitted; no note omissible or of slight significance. Here is an opening of most pregnant import. One scene of moderate length has impressed us, as by the power of fate, to the seeing through of the profoundest drama of life. Here we have witnessed, as it were, the first reaction of the eternal Law, the first hint of destiny in this splendid libertine’s thus far irresistible career. Already is this almost superhuman pleasure-hunt of genius past its climax, and the dread note of retribution is already sounded.