In truth, there is nothing on earth which more elevates a man in his own opinion than love, that love whose vast and conquering influence gives light to the heart, and gives it at once happiness and confusion. Can we be surprised if, when Don Juan hoped to appease by love the passions which rent his breast, that the devil spread a net for him? It was he who inspired Don Juan with the thought that by love and the society of woman we may accomplish on earth those celestial promises which we bear written in the deepest recesses of our hearts, that intense desire which from our earliest days brings us most closely to heaven.
The principal difference Mr. Dwight makes in his rendering of this passage of Hoffman’s is, that where the German, in a very old-fashioned manner, attributes Don Juan’s wickedness to the influence of the Spirit of Evil, Mr. Dwight, by some slight of hand, metamorphoses the Passion of Love into an evil demon, and then gives a fling, as he would express it, at the religious discipline of the times to which he applies the very lucid epithet, “suppressive moralism.” We wish we had some of that “suppressive moralism” at the present day to exercise a little wholesome discipline over the authors of this
Phalanx Socialist Literature.
After this piece of borrowing and altering from Hoffman, the writer talks a great deal about “the old theme and under-current of Opera—the Body and the Soul—the liberty of Passion in conflict with the Law intensely narrowed down by social custom from God’s great law of universal harmony,” and such like rubbish, and then informs us in a note, with his usual precision, by way of illustrating this “under-current” of “Body and Soul” in “Old Opera theme,” that, strange to say, the first Opera he reads of, and which was produced at Rome in 1600, bore the name of “Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo!”
Now if this were so, it is puzzling to know what it would have to do with all his talk about “the under-current of Body and Soul” in Don Giovanni: but it is not true. The first Opera on record is Euridice, the libretto composed by the poet Rinuccini, the music by the composer Peri. It was presented, as he says, in 1600, but not at Rome—at Florence, on the occasion of the marriage of Mary di Medici with Henri Quatre of France.
In 1600, Emilio del Cavalieri, of Rome, brought out an Oratorio, which was sung in a church in that city, which bore the title “Dell Anima e di Corpo;” and the invention of Recitative dates from these two compositions—the opera Euridice of Peri, and the Sacred Oratorio of Cavalieri. But it answered his purpose to imagine this the other way, and with his usual want of accuracy he applied it—or he was ignorant, and with true transcendental presumption, took it for granted no one knew any more than he did.
Such reviews as this we now write of would be scarcely worth noticing, if it were not for the fact, that they are accepted by the uninstructed, for real bona fide musical criticisms, founded on actual knowledge. One might have expected that Mr. Saroni’s rebuking exposure of his Musical Trinity Article, would have startled the author into something like modesty; and when one sees how reckless he is, it makes one wish that Mr. Saroni would carry his threat into execution, and publish those “certain articles” on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which bear such a remarkable similarity to Mr. Dwight’s lectures.
M. Bombert says, in his “Life of Mozart,” when speaking of this Opera of Don Giovanni—
“He (Mozart) shines in the awful accompaniment to the reply of the statue—a composition perfectly free from all inflation or bombast—it is the style of Shakspeare in music.”
Now for Mr. Dwight’s patch-work—straightway he snatches up this idea of M. Bombert, and makes use of it thus: