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BY JOHN S. DWIGHT.

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This masterpiece of Mozart must always stand as the highest type of musical drama. Yet most persons who go to this famous opera for the first time, and look over the libretto, are disappointed in a worse sense than the travelers who complain of the first unimposing view of Niagara. It seems to them a waste of so much fine music, to couple it with the mere story of a desperate rake, (a young cavalier estremamente licenzioso, as he is set down in the list of characters,) who, after running a most extravagant career, is brought to judgment in a marvelous way; namely, by his inviting in jest the statue of an old man whom he had murdered, the father of the noble lady he had sought to ruin, to sup with him; and by being surprised in the midst of his feast by the statue in good earnest, with the whole posse comitatÛs of the nether world rising to claim him! We are at a loss at first to account for the charm of so vulgar and grotesque a tissue of absurdities. Yet there is a meaning in it that concerns us all.

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.

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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.

The next scene introduces us to one of the personified reproaches of Don Juan’s better nature. As the Don and his man are plotting new adventures, a lady passes, in hat and feathers, with excited air, and, as they retreat into the shade to note her, she pours out her most musical complaint against the traitor who has played falsely with her heart. The introductory symphony or ritornel, in E flat major, by its bold and animated strain indicates the high-spirited and passionate nature now before us, whose song of ever constant though wronged love, to words that would fain threaten terrible revenge, commences the Terzetto, mainly solo, to which the mocking by-play of the Don and Leporello, accompanied by a mocking figure of the instruments, supplies the other two parts. As he steps up to offer consolation to the lady, he recognizes his own simple, loving, poor deserted mistress, Donna Elvira, and while the same mocking instrumental figure leaves the song hanging in the air, as it were, without any cadence or any close, he slips away and leaves the task of explanation to the disconcerted servant. There is an ardent, passionate yearning in this as in all of Elvira’s melodies, which climb high and are perhaps the most difficult in the opera. The character is seldom conceived truly by the actress. Interpreted by its music, its intention is distinct enough. Elvira is no half-crazed, foolish thing; but one of the highest moral elements in the personnel of the opera; next in dignity, at least, to Donna Anna. However she may appear in the libretto and in the common usage of the stage, Mozart in his music makes her the soul of ardent and devoted love and constancy, still fondly hoping in the deeper, better self of the man who has trifled with her; like a sweet, genuine ray of sun shine, always indicating to Don Juan a chance of escape from the dark labyrinthine fatality of crime in which he goes on involving himself; always offering him true love for false.

Let her not listen then (like the silly girl we commonly see upon the stage, half-magnetized out of a weak sorrow into a weaker involuntary yielding to the ludicrous) to the exquisitely comic appeal of Leporello, when the vain-glorious fellow unrolls his tremendous list of his master’s conquests among the fair sex, enumerating the countries, ranks, styles of beauty, etc. The melody of this “Catalogue Song” is altogether surpassing. It is the perfection of buffo, as we have before had the perfection of serious recitative. After naming the numbers for Italy, Germany, etc., when it comes to the climax (Elvira’s own land): Ma in Espagna mille e trÈ, [But in Spain one thousand and three,] it is ludicrously grave; the orchestra meanwhile has chopped the measure into short units, alternate instruments just touching different points of height and depth, till they seem at last to count it all up on the fingers, first downward in the tripping pizzicato scale of the violins, then upward in gruff confirmation in the basses. In the slow time, where it comes to the specification of the different qualities of beauty, the grande maËstosa, the piccina, etc., the melody is one of the most beautiful and pathetic that could be imagined. One wonders how Mozart could have expended such a wealth of melody upon so light a theme; it seems as lavish a disproportion of means to end, as when we read of travelers roasting their eggs in the cinders of Vesuvius. But such was the musical fullness and integrity of Mozart; the genial vein, once opened, would run only pure gold; and his melodies and harmonies are not merely proportioned to the specialities of the subject, but are at every moment moulded in the style and spirit of the whole work. Besides, the comedy consists here in the contrast of a pathetic melody with a grotesque thought. Moreover the whole thing is truer in the fact, that not only Leporello’s, but Don Juan’s own melodies, as indeed the very nature of music, seem mournfully to rebuke the desperado. In the most comic and most bacchanalian strains, the music saddens with a certain vague presentiment of the fearful dÉnouement of the drama.

The Don’s next adventure is the meeting of a gay group of peasants at a wedding festival, where he attempts to seduce away the pretty bride, Zerlina, whose naÏve and delicious songs, right out of a simple, good, loving heart, a little coquettish withal, are among the purest gems of the piece, and have mingled their melody with the civilized world’s conceptions of truth and nature and the charm of innocence. Those of our readers who have enjoyed with us the privilege of hearing and seeing a worthy, indeed a perfect personation of Zerlina, by that refined and charming artist, Signora Bosio, will need no words to give them a just conception of the character, and of its music, which is as individual as that of Anna or Elvira. Suffice it to say, that the simplicity, the tenderness and the coquetry of this pretty peasant, have the natural refinement of a superior nature. Mozart must have been in love with the part. The rustic chorus opening this scene, in which the bridal pair lead off, is one of perfect simplicity, (Allegro, 6—8 time,) and yet inimitable beauty. The Duett, La ci darem la mano, in which Don Juan overcomes the hesitation of the dazzled, spell-bound girl, breathes the undoubted warmth of passion; few simple souls could be proof against such an eloquent confession. Indeed the sincerity of all this music is a great part of its charm; it has never the slightest symptom of any striving for effect, and yet it is consummate art; it flows directly out of the characters and situations and the dramatic tendency of the whole. The poor girl is rescued this time by the entrance of an experienced guardian angel, who sees through the case at once. It is Donna Elvira, who, just as she is tripping away with the fascinator to the gay, consenting tune of Andiam, (let us go,) snatches the bird from his hands. Her song of warning to the simple one, Ah! fuggi ’l traditor, is a strangely elaborate Handelian aria, so different in style from the rest of the opera that it is never performed. As if all things conspired to confound the traitor, Donna Anna and her lover also enter, (Zerlina having withdrawn,) and here ensues that wonderful Quartette, Non ti fidar, in which each voice-part is a character, a melody of a distinct genius, and all wrought into a perfect unity. Elvira warns Anna and Ottavio against confiding in this generous-looking Don, whose aid they have unwittingly bespoken in their search for the murderer of the first scene (namely himself;) Don Juan declares that she is crazy, and not to be minded; the others are divided between pity for her and respect for such a gentleman; and all these strands are twisted into one of the finest concerted pieces in all opera. It is one of those peculiar triumphs of opera which make it so much more dramatic than the spoken drama; for here you have four characters expressing themselves at once, with entire unity of effect, yet with the distinctest individuality. The music makes you instantly clairvoyant to the whole of them; you do not have to wait for one after the other to speak; there is a sort of song-transparency of all at once; the common chord of all their individualities is struck. Especially is this achieved in the concerted pieces, the quartettes, trios, and so forth, of Mozart, which are beyond comparison with most of those in the Italian opera of the day, since the harmony in them is not the mere coloring of one thought, but the interweaving of so many distinct individualities.

Zerlina is saved, but by arrangement with her protectors agrees to go up to the Don’s palace, whither Leporello has conducted the whole wedding party, and even coaxed along the jealous bridegroom. A scene ensues between Donna Anna and her lover. The orchestra, in a few startling and almost discordant shrieks, indicates the intense excitement of her mind, for, as Don Juan took his leave, she recognized the look and voice of one whom she had too much cause to remember; and in impassioned bursts of hurried recitative, alternating with the said spasmodic bits of instrumentation, she exclaims, Quegli È il carnefice del mio padre, (this man is my father’s murderer,) and in the same grandly lyric style, rising higher and higher, she tells Ottavio the story of her outrage. Having reached the climax, this magnificent recitative becomes melody, and completes itself in the sublime Aria, Or tu sai, “Now thou knowest who attempted my honor,” etc. There can be nothing greater, more Minerva-like in dignity and high expression of the soul of justice outraged, and at the same time full of all feminine tenderness and beauty, in the whole range of opera or drama. And it is Music, it is Mozart that has done it all. We have here the character of Donna Anna in its most sublime expression; a character that transcends mere personal relations, that bears a certain mystical relationship with the higher power beginning to be felt in the development of this human history. In this song she rises, as it were, to the dignity of an impersonation of the moral principle in the play, and this high sentiment of hers is like a foretaste of the coming fate and supernatural grandeur, which are to form the never to be forgotten finale of the piece. Elvira is entirely in the sphere of the personal; she loves Don Juan to the last, and like the simple good humanity that still appeals to him though still rejected. But Anna is superhuman and divine; she reveals the interworking of the Infinite in all these finite human affairs; to Heaven, rather than to Ottavio, is her appeal; and from beyond this life she looks to see the vindicator of her cause appear. The loftiness of the music just considered, and the stately trumpet-tones of the orchestra, which always herald the entrance of Donna Anna and her party, connect her unmistakably with the marvelous elements of the drama; she is Feeling prophesying Justice; she is Faith in the form of woman; and the singer who could perfectly present Donna Anna would be worthy to sing Handel’s song, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

From one extreme we pass to its opposite. In strongest possible contrast with the high moral passion of this last, is what now follows. We have a song embodying the very frenzied acme of Don Juan’s zest of sensual pleasure. He directs Leporello about the feast, and trolls off, like one possessed, his famous champagne song, Finch’an del vino, whose rapidity and glorious abandon are too much for almost all the baritones; those, in whose dragging utterance it does not become commonplace, are apt to give it with a swaggering glibness, and a coarseness that has nothing of the fine champagne enthusiasm about it. In this song and that last of Donna Anna’s the two electric poles, as it were, of the whole play, have met. And now for the pretty episode of peasant life again; the inimitably sweet, insinuating, loving song in which repentant little Zerlina seems to invite chastisement from her offended, jealous lover, Batti, batti, O bell’ Masetto, (beat me, beat me, dear Masetto!). With what soft tendrils of melody, enhanced by the delicious instrumentation, she steals around his senses and his heart! And to what unaffected rapture (to say nothing of a little coquettish triumph) the strain changes when he forgives her, as she knew he would! This seems a very simple song, but it is the perfection of art. O that Mozart could go into ecstasies with his own pet Zerlina, hearing Bosio sing this!

We have now reached the musical Finale of the first act, though there is much shifting of scenes and characters before the last grand ensemble, which is the ball in the Don’s palace. But these only suspend, to wonderfully enhance, the final stroke. We can only enumerate the delicious series of ever new and characteristic musical ideas preliminary to the feast: (1.) Masetto urging Zerlina to hide herself—how full of the bustle of approaching splendors is the music during this little hurried duett! (2.) The Don’s voice stimulating the peasants to the coming mirth, with their responsive chorus. (3.) Then his discovery of the shy bird and half reclaimal of her love, with his blank surprise (so perfectly depicted in the sudden modulation of the music) as he leads her off only to meet the watchful bridegroom: Masetto si, Masetto! (during all which the light twittering phrases of the accompaniment make the whole atmosphere instinct with joys expected.) (4.) Then, as the instruments suddenly change to a cautious, half-hushed, tip-toe melody, unflagging in its speed, yet in the minor mood, (for these have no festivity in their hearts that now come) the entrance of Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio, in black dominos, and masked to the outward eye, though each betrayed by a distinctive style of melody. (5.) Then the sounding (from within the house) of that stately minuett, a strain which everybody knows and loves, and still as fresh as when first written, here introduced as a mere foretaste of itself, and of the ball, and made the musical ground-work of lordly courtesy and hospitality to the salutations of Don Juan and Leporello, who appear above at the window, and invite the maskers in. (6.) The surpassing Trio, in which the three, lingering on the threshold, invoke Heaven’s protection to innocence ensnared. Can any other opera show such an exuberance of musical ideas in the same space? And it is all en passant, all incidental to what follows, to what now bursts instantly upon the view as the back scene is withdrawn, and you see all the crowd and splendor of the ball-room, and are transported by the indescribably rich Finale, that ever climbing, widening crescendo and accumulation of all musical effects, till the climax is reached in a general storm and inundation of harmony. The simple, gay, continuous six-eight melody, to which the whole brilliant spectacle moves at first, is the very soul of festivity. Suddenly there is a full chord in C from the whole orchestra, with trumpets, and a stately, march-like strain, preluding the entrance of the three in masks, with the lordly welcome of the Amphytrion. He will have no time lost, however, for into this one high hour he has concentrated all the delights and harmonies of sense—short, bright and strong be the blood-quickening chorus, Viva la liberta! and now let the dance go on. And now are crowded into a brief but most capacious moment, the reintroduction of the Minuett in a bolder key than before, to whose grave, deliberate measure the more elegant company begins to move in antique, solemn steps; then presently, commingling with the Minuett, but not disturbing it, two other tunes, to other rhythms, namely, a rustic contra-dance, and a most rapid waltz, inspiring the heels of the peasants; the droll attempts of Leporello to make Masetto dance, while his master has bespoken the arm and ear of the pretty bride, to win whom he has planned this whole array; the indignant observation of this game by Donna Anna, with difficulty moderated until due time by her companions; the piercing shriek of the music as Don Juan whirls Zerlina away out of the dance; the cry for aid; the general rush to the door whence the sounds proceed, and when it is broken in, the grotesque brief diversion of the Don dragging Leporello by the ear, and trying to fasten his own crime on him; the incredulous and accusing phrase, in which the voices of the trio, now unmasked, confront him successively in Canon style; and the out-bursting of the general tempest of wrath upon the exposed deceiver, heightened, too, by the sweeping wind and hissing lightnings of an actual physical storm that is supposed to be passing without. The strength of the accusing chorus is splendidly terrific, and like the rush of a whirlwind, where all the voices in unison swiftly traverse up and down several times the first five notes of the scale. But he of the dauntless will and the magnetic eye, with one sword awes back and penetrates the maddened mob, escaping with a loud laugh of defiance.

Our very slight and hasty sketch has already grown to considerable length, and yet we have examined only one act of the three, into which “Don Giovani” is usually divided in the performance. One act was enough to show (if that were all our object) how this opera wells up as from an exhaustless fountain of musical ideas, all of which are of the inspired, enduring quality; we have listened to materials enough already for some twenty of the fashionable operas of our day. We must glance more hastily at the remainder.

Act II. opens with one of those half humorous, half serious conversations between the Don and Leporello, which ever and anon relieve the story. The servant, stung by the ungrateful and outrageous conduct of his master in the ball-room explosion, announces his determination to quit him; but they are too essential to each other, and the Don soon coaxes, laughs, and bribes him out of that notion. This duett is in real Italian parlando style, a syllable to every note, quick and brief as it is comically expressive; for this enemy of woman’s peace has new business on hand; the unlucky night is not too far gone to try one more adventure. So here follows the summer warmth and beauty of the serenade scene under Donna Elvira’s window, who sits above there, pouring out her nightingale complainings under the stars, in a melody of ravishing sweetness and tenderness, forming the upper part of a Terzetto, in which the sotto voce dialogue of the Don and his man below grotesquely blends. He changes garments with Leporello, and lending his own voice, while Leporello gesticulates, in strains of feigned repentance and returning love, entices the too easily persuaded lady down into the arms of his counterfeit, while he takes up his guitar to serenade, not Elvira, but Elvira’s maid, now that the field is clear, in that most graceful little serenading air, which seems so easy and so off-hand, with its light arpeggio accompaniment by violins alone: Deh vieni alla finestra. But the fortunate stars of our all-seducing hero seem this night to have forsaken him; again his business is balked. Mirth and melody, fun and sentiment are strangely mingled in this scene, and, indeed, in this whole act. The serenade gets finished; the tree, as it were, is climbed; but before the fruit can be gathered, the game is interrupted by Masetto and the peasants armed, hot from the ball-room scene, in search of the splendid scoundrel. Masetto gets the worst of it; and here we have one of the world’s three or four very choicest and purest gems of melody, Zerlina’s exquisitely tender and comforting song to her poor, bruised, and beaten bridegroom, Vedrai carino; so beautifully simple, in the homely key of C natural; so innocently voluptuous; so full of blissful love; so like the balsam (un certo balsamo) of which she hints with fond and arch significance! And as she makes him place his hand upon her heart at the words, sentilo battere, (feel it beat,) you seem to hear its glad and honest beating in the music. We cannot forbear inserting here the following interpretation of this song, which we have read since our analysis of the opera was made. It is from the pen of an intelligent Russian gentleman, who has written in French and German an admirable Life of Mozart, with a critical examination of his works. We translate from the German copy:

“Vedrai Carino is, like so many pieces of our opera, super-dramatic music. When we hear it, we forget the text, we forget the person. There is no longer any Zerlina or Masetto. Something infinite, absolute, and verily divine announces itself to the soul. Is it perhaps nothing but love, represented under one of the countless modifications by which it is distinguished in each individual, according to the laws of his nature, and the peculiar vicissitudes of his fortune? No; the soul feels rather a direct effluence of the principle itself, from which all youth, all love, all joy, and every vital reproduction flows. The genius of the Spring’s metamorphoses, he namely, whom the old theosophists called Eros, who disembroiled chaos, who fructified germs and married hearts; this genius speaks to us in this music, as he has so often spoken in the murmurings of the brook that has escaped its icy prison, in the rustling of the young leaves, in the melodious songs of the nightingale, in the balmy odors which pervade the eloquent and inspiring stillness of a May night. Mozart had listened to and firmly held this ground-accord of this universal harmony; he arranged it for a soprano voice with orchestral accompaniment, and made of it the nuptial air of a young bride. Zerlina sings, surrounded by the shadows of the marriage night, while just about to cross the threshold, at which virginity pauses with prayer and trembling, expecting the confirmation of the holy title of wife. In this place the Aria becomes a genuine scena of love, the source of life and of eternal rejuvenescence for all nature—of love, the spring-time of souls, and the most unstinted revelation of the all-goodness of the Creator. It is a marriage-song for all that loves, conceived in the same spirit with the ‘Ode to Joy’ by Schiller, allowing for the difference of tone and style between a Dithyrambic and an Eclogue. The theme, the image of the purest bliss, betrays none the less that inexplicable and seldom justified exaltation, which, in the fairest poetic hours of our existence, leads us to that unknown good whereof all other goods of earth are only shadows and foretastes. A rhythm without marked accent; a harmony without dissonances; a modulation which rests in the Tonic, and forgets itself, as if held fast there by a magic spell; a melody which cannot separate itself from its ineffaceable motiv; this tranquil rapture, this soft ecstasy, fill out the first half of the air. After the pause, hosts of nightingales begin to sing in chorus in the orchestra, while the voice, with exquisite monotony, murmurs, Sentilo battere, toccami quÀ. Then the same words are again uttered with the expression of passion; the heart of the young woman beats stronger and stronger; the sighs of the orchestra are redoubled, and the last vocal phrase, which bears the impress of chaste devotion, shows us the wife as she sinks softly upon the bosom of her husband. Mozart seems to have anticipated the desire of the ear, in that he lets the orchestra repeat the whole motiv and the enchanting final phrases once again. He knew that the piece would be found too short, as it actually is the case.”

Good-night, then, to this happy couple, whom we leave, to trace the sequel of the comic vein just opened in that ‘Sartor’-ian exchange of personality between the master and the servant; but also at the same to receive still more distinct and solemn intimations (all the more significant for this very contrast of the comic) of the supernatural reaction that is preparing soon to burst upon the head of the magnificent libertine and outlaw. The Sextette which now follows is altogether unique and unrivaled among concerted pieces in opera. The music of this Sextette covers such an ever-shifting variety of action, and so much of a scene, that one may hear it once without thinking of its wealth and admirable structure as music. Yet for every point in all this action, and for all shades of relation between the persons, as well as for each separate personality, there is a correspondence in the music. The scene has changed to a bujo loco, or dark place, (the libretto says, a porch to Donna Anna’s palace.) First appear the counterfeit Giovanni and Elvira, who is too happy to walk with him to the end of the world, if need be; while he, (Leporello,) tired of imitating his master’s voice, is groping about to find an exit. In an Andante melody, in the same key, and of a kindred character with that by which we first knew her (Ah! chi mi dice mai,) she utters her fear of being left alone in this bujo loco. Just as her companion finds the door, the groping, cautious music brightens into the bold key and trumpet-style which always heralds Anna and Ottavio, who enter amid blaze of torches. Sweet is the consoling appeal of the tenore to his grief-stricken Anna, whose response, less fiery and commanding, but not less sublimely spiritual than her last great solo, even hints of death as the only solution of life’s riddle for her. Meanwhile the first two, who have lurked unnoticed, are just making good their exit, when Zerlina and Masetto appear, who thinks that now he has the briccone at his mercy; the bluster of Masetto, the surprise of Anna and Ottavio at the sight of the supposed Giovanni, the grotesque, crouching plea of the valet, the intercession of still deceived Elvira for “her husband,” then their recognition of her, then a new brandishing of Masetto’s club, and then the ass throwing off the lion’s skin, and begging mercy, all are made thrice expressive by the music, which varies instinctively each moment, and yet ceases not to weave the unitary complex whole. At last all the six voices join in a swift and wind-like Allegro, in which Anna’s voice takes the highest and most florid part, Zerlina’s the second, Elvira’s the third, and so on, and in which there is now and then a wild Æolian-harp-like passage of harmony, which seems the fore-feeling of the higher powers which henceforth are to take part in the drama.

But first we have the masterpiece and model of all tenor solos. In it Ottavio commends his Il mio tesoro to the care of these friends, and in it he proves himself the truest, tenderest, most devoted and most religious of lovers, if Heaven has reserved it to a stronger force than his to crush the mighty sinner against whom he has taken such an oath of vengeance. But the opera could not rob itself of the statue, and its last scene, and its whole sublimity, to make him a hero, when it was enough that he should know how to love a Donna Anna.

Passing over a duett between Leporello and Zerlina, rarely sung, in fact an after-thought of the composer, which he is said to have added to conciliate the lower taste of a Viennese manager or audience; and passing over (for we must be brief) a truly transcendent solo for Elvira: Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata, in whose fluid, ever-modulating melody her musing, sad soul seems dissolved in reverie, we come to the marvelous church-yard scene. Here glimmers the white equestrian statue of the murdered commander in the back-ground; and here the Don and Leporello seek a rendezvous after their new discomfiture, to re-exchange hats and mantles, and so forth. Their loud levity is suddenly hushed by a voice of warning from the statue, accompanied in strange chords by the unearthly tones of the trombones (which instruments, instead of being lavished in Verdi fashion, upon all the strong passages, have been entirely kept back till now for this supernatural “beginning of the end,”) mingled with the low reed tones. Di rider finirai, etc. (“Thou shalt cease to laugh before dawn!”) A short old choral strain, in which the voice ends, spectral-like, upon the Dominant of the key (A minor), struck with the major Third. This is a church cadence; it belongs to eternity, which knows no Minor, no such type of “earthly un-rest.” It freezes to the heart of Don Giovanni, who starts dismayed, but only for a moment; and soon the marble lips break silence once more to rebuke his mockery. So far it has been introductory recitative; but now the orchestra is all life and melody again, for the luscious music of the duett in which Giovanni compels the trembling servant at the sword’s point to salute the statue and invite him to sup with him. There is no more exquisite fairy-work in the whole opera than the instrumentation of this scene. It were hard to tell whether the impression left by it partakes most of the comic, of the supernaturally terrible, or of the beautiful. All these elements are grotesquely blended in it, yet without seeming incongruity. The beauty of the music harmonizes and idealizes the action; it lends its singular fascination to the marvelous; it makes the terror doubly real, by expressing the vague charm which every terror has after all to the soul, glad (even in its terror) of the excitement of something altogether strange and infinite. Mozart knew better than to freeze the blood up here entirely, with unearthly tones of horror, except during those brief utterances of the marble rider; that he reserved for the end, of which this is but the beginning. He has lavished all the luxury of melodic invention upon the instrumentation of this duett; the music in the main still gushes warm and genial and human, and hence you feel the supernatural all the more inwardly and powerfully, when shudders of strange awe cross occasionally its placid, sparkling flow. O statua gentillissima—cheerily and bravely the beautiful strain sets out, in the rich key of E major; but as the knave shrinks back in terror, crying padron! mirate! etc., the deprecating expression of his voice dropping through the interval of a Seventh, with the instruments accompanying in unison, is alike droll and marvelous. Still the cheerful melody goes on, in spite of ghosts, until the statue nods acceptance, when the unearthly modulation and tremolo of the music, falling with sudden emphasis upon Leporello’s Ah! — —h! che scena! (Ah! what a sight!), gives the whole scene for the time the superstitious coloring of his soul. But when he comes to tell his master how the spectre nodded, and when his master repeats the strain and gesture with him, the fear has become subordinate to the charm of adventure, and the music takes the gay and reckless tone of Giovanni. Life shall be all a feast, is his creed, ghosts and miracles to the contrary; and festally the bright strain dies away, softer and softer, as they depart, to the tune of Andiamo via di qua (let us quit this place), to which the servant’s voice chimes in as second very heartily.

Here the curtain usually falls, closing a second Act, although the composer covers the homeward flight of the pair, fatigued and hungry with that night’s adventures and discomfitures, and the preparation of the supper, by a beautiful and elaborate recitative and aria of Donna Anna, addressed to her devoted Ottavio, whose urgent plea for the consummation of their union she tenderly puts off, as with a presentiment that her love is to know no earthly consummation, and that her life is already too much of the other world. This song: Non mi dir, bloomed one of the heavenliest and purest in the wreath of Jenny Lind.

Act Third is the grand Finale, with its tremendous music, its apparition, its supernatural vindication of the Law, and the splendid sinner’s doom. Remember, day has not dawned yet since that other Finale, to the First Act; their supper that time was stormily broken off, and they have had little rest in the mean time. But they have got home at last, and Gia la mensa È preparata: now the supper is prepared; a smart and animated strain of full orchestra in the bold key of D. The Don has shut himself in by himself with all the harmonies of sense and appetite; it is the pure feast of egoism; there are no guests, but his own appetites and riotous imaginations, for whom all things are provided; and little thinks he of the guest whom he has invited! Droll Leporello, now all appetite, is in attendance, devouring furtive morsels of the rich dishes, and uncorking the champagne, (a situation commonly too tempting to our buffo, who makes the fun excessively and disgustingly broad,) and making broad allusions to the barbaro appetito of his master. There is a band of wind instruments, too, from whom all the while proceed the most enlivening appeals to composite enjoyment, in a succession of rare morsels of melody from well-known operas of the time, for which both master and man show an appreciating ear. The last of these is the famous Non piu andrai, from Mozart’s own “Nozze di Figaro,” to which Leporello may well exclaim: “That I know too well.” Through all this the Titian-like, voluptuous quality of Mozart comes out afresh. It is the music of pure, unalloyed sensuous enjoyment; not a shadow of aught serious or sentimental comes over its harmony, until once more his better nature makes one final appeal, entreating him to repentance, in the person of poor, constant Donna Elvira, who suddenly rushes in and kneels at his feet. But the Don laughs at her simple lecture, and preaches up to her his bacchanalian gospel.

Here mark a fine point in the action, a fine touch of poetic truth, worthy of Mozart’s genius. It is she, his better nature, as we have said, his own rejected truer self, who loves him better than he loves himself; it is she, Elvira, who, as she leaves the stage, is the first to meet the fearful apparition and by her shriek give warning. That shriek, thrown into the music, has suddenly changed its smooth, sparkling surface into fierce boiling eddies, and stirred up the whole sea of harmony from its profoundest depths. The musicians on the stage have vanished. No time now for their toy melodies! Every chord now cleaves the dark veil of the supernatural, like lightnings in the blackest night; the syncopated rhythm tells of vague and wonderful forebodings. Che grido È questo? (What noise is this?) And Leporello is sent out to see. Wilder and heavier grows the music, as he returns white and speechless, and only able in his half-wittedness of terror to imitate with his feet the heavy ta, ta, the approaching foot-fall of the man of marble, who has descended from his charger in the grave-yard. It requires the master’s hardihood to open the door for him, and amid those solemn and terrific crashes of the orchestra, with which the overture commenced, the strange guest stalks into the middle of the scene.

With hard, ponderous, marble tones, like blows, falling whole octaves, the statue announces himself as good as his word in accepting Giovanni’s invitation. The amazed unbeliever, trembling and yet summoning up his whole pride of will, which never yet forsook him, would fain prove as good as his word, too, and orders Leporello, who has crawled away under the table, to get ready another supper. But “not on mortal food feeds” this guest from the other world; “graver concerns” have led him here; and the instruments are again traversing those unsettled scales, whose wonderful effect we noticed in the overture. Parla, parla: rings out the rich, fresh baritone of the dauntless Amphytrion, as much as to say: “talk on, old fellow! I listen; you are a ghost, but I am a substance; I believe in myself, say what you will.” All very brave! but listen to the orchestra (as you cannot help listening) if you would know how nevertheless it goes with him in the inner workings of his soul, in those mysterious depths of consciousness which hitherto he has so wilfully refrained from sounding. That heavy, muffled tread of the sub-bass in triplets, making the ground quake, means more than the “tertian ague” of poor Leporello there, with head thrust out cautiously from under the table, and voice, automaton-like, moving in unison with the basso profondo of the orchestra. A pause is filled with a monotonous beat of the basses, when the crashing diminished-seventh chords begin anew, and louder than before, while the spectre again opens its marble jaws to tender the Don an invitation in its turn, which he, stout-hearted to the last, in spite of Leporello’s trembling, grotesque warnings, accepts. The statue asks his hand in pledge; he boldly gives it, starts as if an infinite pang and sense of death shot from the cold, stony hand through all the marrow of his bones; with an infinite audacity of will he refuses to repent; the spectre sinks through the ground; he is a doomed one; the flames of hell burst in on every side, with visions of the damned; a chorus of spectres: vieni! (come!) is heard amid the infernal whirl and tempest of the music; he wrestles with the demons and drops dead, the whole phantasmagoria vanishing, just as the other characters of the piece come in search of the reprobate, who listen to Leporello’a chattering story, dispose of their several destinies after the approved fashion of dramatic conclusions, and wind up with chanting a solemn canon over the Dissoluto punito, to the words: “Such is the end of the evil-doer!”

It is usual, however, to terminate the performance with the fall of Giovanni. The parts which follow, although admirable as music, are plainly superfluous to the action, as a poetic and artistic whole, and must have been added by Mozart out of mere conformity to old dramatic usage, which assembles and disposes of all the surviving characters of a piece in the last scene.

There is great room for melodramatic nonsense and diablerie in this judgement scene, in which the theatres have used full license. But if the orchestra be complete and efficient, there is no possibility of travestying or perverting the sublime and terrible intention of the music, which from the moment that the statue enters is enough to freeze one’s blood, and preoccupies all avenues of sense or consciousness with supernatural and infinite suggestions. And yet does Music’s sweet and faithful prophecy of reconciliation, like the “still, small voice” out of the inmost heart of things, still reach us somehow through it all!

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The reader, who has followed us through this review of “Don Giovanni,” clinging always to the musical thread of interpretation, will find himself as little able as ourselves to sympathize with the regret, so frequently expressed, that Mozart should have prostituted his genius in this composition, by the false marriage of so much divine music with an unworthy subject. We believe the marriage was a true one. He did not merely cater to a low, licentious taste, in the selection of this story. Never was a choice made more heartily. Or, if he did not himself choose the plot, yet he fell in most heartily, and as it were, by a providential correspondence with the invention of Da Ponte—as heartily as he afterward fell in with the terrific images of the old Latin hymn, when he composed his own “Requiem,” in writing a Requiem to order for another. In these two works the life and genius of Mozart found their highest expression. “Don Juan” and the “Requiem,” in all their contrast, are alike true to the very texture and temper of the man. “Don Juan,” written in the hey-day of his genial faculties, in his hour and scene of greatest outward success, in the city of Prague, where he was understood and loved as nowhere else, surrounded by devoted friends, and with an orchestra and troup of singers worthy to be his interpreters, represents his sunny side, his keen sensibility to all refined delights of sense and soul, and his great faith in joy, in ecstasy, in all material and sensual harmonies. The “Requiem” bears to “Don Juan,” as a whole, the same relation that the last scene of that opera bears to the preceding parts; it expresses the religious awe and mystery of his soul, his singular presentiment of death, his constant feeling of the Infinite. The opera, in its last scene, rises to a sphere of music kindred with the “Requiem;” there vibrated the same deep chords of his nature. It was the very subject of all others for him to pour the whole warm life-tide of his soul and music into, and thus lift up and animate a poor old literal fiction, that somehow strangely kept its hold upon the popular mind, with all its weight of grotesqueness, extravagance, vulgarity and tom-foolery, into a vivid drama of the whole impetuous, bewildered, punished, yet far-hoping and indomitable experiment of human life.

Here are the two elements which seem in contradiction. Here, on the one side, is this bold, generous passion-life, with its innate gospel of joy, and transport, and glorious liberty; how well could Mozart understand it, and how eloquently preach it in that safe, universal dialect of Music, which utters only the heart-truth, and not the vulgar perversion of any sentiment! Here, on the other hand, is the stern Morality of being, frowning in conflict with the blind indulgence of the first. The first is false by its excess, by losing Order out of sight; while Order, sacred principle, in its common administration between men, in its turn is false, through its blind method of suppression and restraint, blaspheming and ignoring the divine springs of passion, which it should accept and regulate. The music is the heavenly and prophetic mediator that resolves the strife.

Hence the music of “Don Giovanni” presents two sides, two parts in strongest contrast. Love, joy, excitement, freedom, the complete life of the senses, are the theme of the first part, represented in the keen and restless alternation of the Don’s intrigues and pleasures—a downright, unmistrusting, beautiful assertion of the natural man—and you have it all summed up to one text and climax, in the first Finale, in the brief champagne sparkle and stormy transport of the little chorus, Viva la Liberta! As the burden of that part is Liberty, so the burden of the last part, the counter-text and focus, is Order, the violated Law; and as the central figure here stalks in the supernatural statue, stony and implacable. It is the whole story of life, the one ever-repeated, although ever-varied drama of dramas; and it is set forth here, both sides of it, most earnestly in this sincere and hearty music, which in its own exhaustless beauty hints the reconciliation of the two principles, and to the last is true to the divine good of the senses and the passions, and to the presentiment of a pure and perfect state, when these shall be, not dreaded, not suppressed, but regulated, harmonized, made rhythmical and safe, and more than ever lifesome, and spontaneous by Law as broad and deep and divine us themselves.

Do we defy the moral of the matter, when we feel a certain thrill of admiration as Don Juan boldly takes the statue’s hand, still strong in his life-creed, however he may have missed the heavenly method in its carrying out, and somehow inspired with the conviction that this judicial consummation is not, after all, the end of it; but that the soul’s capacity for joy and harmony is of that god-like and asbestos quality that no hells can consume it?

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BY MRS. E. C. KINNEY.

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BY A. J. REQUIER.

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BY E. ANNA LEWIS.

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A TALE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

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BY JANE GAY.

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