ARTicles vol. 6 i.1a: Don Juan Giovanni Program Notes

Thief of Hearts: The Potency of Don Juan

by Sarah Ollove

Men want to emulate him, women want him and want to change him. Not a bad reputation for a guy born five hundred years ago. From his first appearance, Don Juan, the Latin lover of a thousand conquests, seduced his way into the lexicon as shorthand for a man whose superhuman virility wins one woman after another.

Don Juan made his debut in Tirso de Molina’s play, El Burlador de Sevilla in 1630, identified by the title as a rogue or trickster. Though this marks the first time Don Juan appears by name, the archetype predates it. Almost every culture from Greece to Africa to North America features a mythological male irresistible to the opposite sex and some sort of trickster figure. Tirso’s play, however, combines these two characters with a third feature: Don Juan’s damnation. Whereas other cultures discourage these traits with a wink, Spanish Catholicism takes a harder line. In the end, Don Juan’s deceit, lust, and cruelty are punished with an eternal roasting.

Molière’s Don Juan introduces another important part of the myth. This addition is named Elvire, Don Juan’s recently abandoned wife, one among a string of marriages Don Juan accumulates in his hedonistic foray through Europe. Though Tirso’s seducer is far from harmless, Molière, while maintaining a comic tone, introduces a cruel Don Juan, careless of the repercussions of his actions. Where Tirso’s Don Juan has too much love to confine himself to one woman, Molière’s courts only lust, not attachment. There are few acts more despicable than seducing a nun and abandoning her without an instant of regret. Don Juan’s passions cool as quickly as they ignite.

In the hundred years between Molière’s play and Mozart’s opera, the legend continued to grow. Mozart most likely saw an earlier operatic adaptation by Giuseppe Gazzaniga (composer) and Giovanni Bertati (librettist) in Vienna called Don Giovanni Tenorio, o sia il convitato di pietra. Gazzaniga (and therefore Mozart) used episodes from Tirso excised from Don Juan, including the beginning from El Burlador de Sevilla. In the opera���s opening, Donna Anna chases Don Giovanni from her bedchamber. Outside her door he encounters her father. They fight, the father falls, Don Giovanni runs, now branded a lover and a killer. Though this plot point drives much of the action in Molière, the actual event happens before the curtain rises, and the wronged woman never appears onstage. Mozart recognized the dramatic value of the skirmish. Thus the operatic Don Giovanni has two sopranos to dodge—while pursuing a third.

Unlike Molière’s play with its comic tone, the opera complicates genres, Mozart went so far as to give it a new name, dramma giocoso. Moments of low comedy intrude upon high tragedy, blurring the Don Juan archetype. When the statue of Donna Anna’s dead father drags Don Juan to hell in Molière, we want to cheer. When the Statue appears in Don Giovanni, the music seduces us into putting ourselves into the Don’s place, and we quake in fear.

Like Don Quixote and Count Almaviva, Don Juan wouldn’t be complete without a servant as his constant companion. The servant appeared at the same time as Don Juan and has been through as many names: Catalinón in Tirso, Sganarelle in Molière, Leporello in Mozart.

Catalinón/Sganarelle/Leporello serves as both a moralizing figure and a comic foil for Don Juan. Even while begging him to quit his evil ways, the servant can’t help but envy his master. Don Juan appeared around the same time as several other archetypes who seized the imagination of the world: Don Quixote, Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and Falstaff. The dreamer, the melancholy intellectual, the damned scholar, the jolly fat man form a modern mythology whose legends are still move us. Don Juan is as potent as ever.

Sarah Ollove is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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Program Notes: Don Juan Giovanni

by Steven Epp & Dominique Serrand

We call it Don Juan Giovanni, placing the titles side by side like the authors from whom we’ve borrowed—Molière and Mozart, but also da Ponte, Tirso de Molina, Lord Byron, and others, including a great deal of ourselves. Our show is a river, but without banks. It is neither a reflection nor an essay, but an event made of opera and theatre. It contains scenes of seduction, separation, hatred, idiocy, intuition, and love. It is not recommended for people who fear the sense of vertigo that comes from staring into the chasm between life and death. Here there is sensuality and abandonment, passion, beauty, and vulgarity too, like greens in a bouquet—all of it resounding in the present moment for today.

The myth of Don Juan is that of the great seducer. For Mozart he was a libertine, and a brutal one. For Molière a heretic, but philosophical. For us he goes beyond comprehension. He is at once the angst and the thirst for life. His eternity resides in the moment and his profound despair in the absence of the moment. This is the gap he inhabits and defines and it is how he seduces and loves and is loved and destroys; why he un-does so passionately, cruel, and relentless.

Don Juan is an insurrection—his life a rejection of all the fathers, all forms of male dominance, all the accepted norms of class and society. Mozart’s Don Giovanni literally kills the Commendatore—the father of one of his conquests. Molière’s Don Juan refutes his own biological father and the acceptance of a patriarchal god. He seduces peasants as well as noble women. He marries his wife, stealing her away from the convent where she has taken refuge. In the end, both incarnations of the myth deny the notions of heaven and hell and face their own death with open arms, ready for the embrace.

As for the women, each pursue their own path, strong in their individuality, but changed irrevocably through their encounters with Don Juan. They are set free into the world and allowed to see it for what it is and is not, but also for all that it could be. The unimagined possibilities become palpable. Each of them in their own way is thrown into the shallow pool of love, only to find themselves at sea.

As for the rest of us, we are invited to see with a new and profound enormity—hate is blind, though politically profitable—love is nonsensical, flabbergasted, bloodshot, and like a river, it always finds its course.

“If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows. It is not through lack of love that Don Juan goes from woman to woman. … But it is indeed because he loves them with the same passion and each time with his whole self that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest.” – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955

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