[In the following essay, Sedwick concludes that neither de Molina's El burlador nor Mozart's Don Giovanni ultimately define the concept of Don Juan.]

Tirso de Molina's Burlador de Sevilla is, among other things, a drama of the collective erotic subconscious, a Renaissance glorification of manly beauty and individual courage, and a baroque theological tragedy. [A paper read at the 36th Annual Meeting of the AATSP, New York, December 29-30, 1954.] Mozart's Don Giovanni portrays a burlador burlado, amateurishly gross in the art of love, and sketchily depicted by the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Mozart's music notwithstanding, Da Ponte lacked the tools for giving sufficient substance to an opera potentially the culmination of a great human and literary theme. Then, too, Tirso's great figure would necessarily lose its magic force in the atmosphere of Figaro. Yet the popular concept of Don Juan, the connotation which the man on the street has for him, is neither tragic nor comic, neither the burlador of Tirso nor the burlador burlado of Da Ponte and Mozart.

Let us first define the “popular concept” of Don Juan and then proceed to seek its source. To the man on the street, Don Juan means “lady's man,” a hero to be identified with the inner romantic life of each individual as a suppressed ideal, a man to be envied. I formulated this definition after I had put a question to each of eighteen people, men and women, not likely to be well educated, including such everyday people as a barber, a truck driver, a grocery clerk, and a salesgirl in a small store. The question was: “What does the statement ‘He is a Don Juan’ mean to you?” If there was a significant reply, I followed it with the query: “Where do you think the expression ‘Don Juan’ comes from?” Sixteen of the eighteen answered the first question to the general effect that a Don Juan was a “lady's man.” To two it meant nothing. As to the second question, none of the sixteen had any idea of the specific origin of the expression; four offered the correct “guess” that it was taken from “some book.” None knew precisely which book or books, although three thought that it was Spanish. None had ever heard of the opera Don Giovanni or of El burlador de Sevilla.

The favorable conception of Don Juan today as a man of charm to whom women are strongly and quickly attracted has come to exist despite the customary treatment of the theme in which Don Juan invariably gains his conquests, and hence his reputation, by deceit rather than through pure charm, his magnetic personality notwithstanding. It is almost impossible to find a Don Juan work in which the libertine gains his end with no trickery involved, even though he has a certain personal allurement capable of stimulating affection at first. The scholar knows Don Juan too well to admire him openly, but the mass-man envies Don Juan because he knows only the favorable unearned increment of Don Juan's personality.

To seek the source of universal popular Donjuanism is to begin by examining the origin of the legend and then by tracing its circuitous route in Europe through the centuries as a drama for the stage. It is lost effort to affirm either that the theme of the debauchee originates with Tirso, or in Lope de Vega's Dineros son calidad, or in Juan de la Cueva's El infamador, or that it goes back to a fifteenth-century auto El ateista fulminado, or to a Leonese romance “Pa’ misa diba un galán,” or that it is recorded first in Ovid's Ars Amandi. Without doubt this very elementary theme of all themes must have been one of the first, in one form or another, not only in all literature, but also in universal folklore. Indeed, one author, Dorothy E. MacKay, in a book entitled The Double Invitation in the Legend of Don Juan, points out the abundance of Don Juan legends in the Romancero, as well as the fact that the “double invitation” was well established in tradition long before the time of Tirso. Until the appearance of the MacKay work in 1943, the only intensive investigation of this legend was that done by Menéndez Pidal in Sobre los orígenes de “El convidado de piedra” in 1906.

Tirso was the first writer to treat effectively and profoundly the religious element in connection with the intrepid seducer. The whole of his play was original, even if the parts were not. Still Tirso's success has been largely aleatory, for it is more his means that has been elaborated upon, the machinations of Don Juan, than his end, the moral. The critics, however, are still not in agreement as to the true meaning of the specific kind of power complex with which Tirso endowed his Don Juan. Ramiro de Maeztu intimates that Don Juan is an atheist; Guillermo Díaz-Plaja's thesis is that the burlador is merely a worshipper of women who is typical of the Neoplatonism and dolce stil nuovo of the Renaissance; Marañón states that the fact that Don Juan is not attracted to women as individuals, but rather as a genus, indicates his immaturity and adolescence; Farinelli even attempts to prove that Don Juan is of Italian origin. Said Armesto accepted this challenge to a polemic and tried to vindicate the originality of Don Juan in favor of Spain. His view was seconded by Unamuno, who further declared Don Juan to be, within Spain, of Galician, not Sevillian, origin. Yet Unamuno frequently noted the etymological relationship between Tenorio and tenor—tenor—and in Unamuno's play El hermano Juan, Don Juan is impotent and feminine, while his women are the seductresses, not the seduced. Only a partial list of those who have published significant books or essays on the Burlador would include such other names as: John Austen, Hans Heckel, Cotarelo y Mori, Schroeder, Agustín, Gendarme de Bévotte, Casalduero, Boelte, Castro, Gillet, Grau, Osma, Menéndez y Pelayo, Spitzer, Muñoz Peña, Ríos de Lampérez, Templin, Bergamín, Lomba, Rank, and even Kierkegaard. Nearly every scholar of note in the field of Hispanic letters ultimately has something to say concerning Don Juan.

After the first edition of Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla in 1630, the legend became known in Italy through the dramas of Giacinto Cicognini and Onofrio Giliberto, with later fame reserved for Goldoni's Don Giovanni Tenorio. In France, versions of the legend by Dorimon and Villiers preceded Molière's well-known Don Juan, ou Le festin de pierre, dated 1665. Molière's play was followed by dramas with the same theme by no less than ten French imitators from 1669 up to 1921. In Spain and in Spanish America, Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio has been a much more successful imitation of the legend than two other Spanish plays by Alonso Cordova y Maldonado and Antonio de Zamora. From England we have Shadwell's The Libertine, Shaw's Man and Superman, and Byron's long poem Don Juan, although the last two can hardly qualify as traditional Don Juan works. Various German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Russian Don Juans have appeared from time to time. Depending on his taste, the reader today can find nearly any kind of Don Juan: hypocrite, amiable, converted, saved, effeminate, aged, degenerate, or acquaintance of Faust. There are at least nine major paintings on the theme, including one Goya, and innumerable musical versions.

Nowadays the most often-seen musical version of Don Juan is that of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, presented for the first time on October 29, 1787, at Prague. Five unimportant Italian musical versions of the legend preceded Mozart's opera, but Mozart and Da Ponte imitated only one in detail. It was the Giuseppe Bertati (composer)-Giovanni Bertati (librettist) little-known opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, o sia Il convitato di pietra, given first at Venice only nine months before Mozart's opera appeared. Da Ponte followed much of the Gazzaniga libretto scene by scene, used most of the characters, giving some of them different names, and duplicated the dialogue of borrowed scenes almost word for word. Incidentally, one of the rare copies of the libretto to Gazzaniga's opera may be found in the Library of Congress. It is, however, Mozart's opera which has become famous, and Gazzaniga's which has been all but forgotten.

Several literary critics who have commented on Don Juan in opera agree with a number of music critics that Mozart's Don Giovanni was intended to be, and is a stirring tragedy, this despite the fact that Mozart himself classified it as dramma giocoso. Jacinto Grau, for example, in his Don Juan en el drama, 1944, admits that Don Giovanni has comical elements but he asserts that “… el milagroso genio de Mozart adivina la grandeza del Burlador y tras … el pateismo irónico de la escena del cementerio, con Leporello, el Comendador y Don Juan, nos da en el último acto, una honda enocion profundamente dramática. …” Christopher Benn, a music critic, complains in his book Mozart on the Stage, 1945, that the modern audience does not take Don Giovanni seriously enough. He says: “A production of Don Giovanni must aim not merely at good presentation of Mozart's music, but at making the opera as a whole convincing to the modern audience.” His point of view that this opera “should send a cold shiver down the back” is not an uncommon one among opera critics. Actually the opera has strayed as far in spirit from its Tirso Molinan ancestry as have all the other versions. Mozart's Don Giovanni is not convincing as a tragedy, nor can it be prescribed to be so simply because the opera does have a leitmotif suggesting tragic overtones in the music. Also one should bear in mind how very much of the story and dialogues are taken from the Gazzaniga libretto, which makes not the slightest pretense of tragedy.

It should be apparent to anyone who has read Tirso and heard Mozart's opera that the intrigues and amorous adventures of Don Giovanni are incontrovertibly more humorous than those of Tirso's Don Juan. For example, one clever scene in the opera is the exchange of cloaks between Don Giovanni and the servant Leporello in order to strand Leporello with Elvira. At the very beginning of the opera, the enumeration of the catalogo delle belle establishes the mirthful atmosphere, so that by the time Don Giovanni tricks Masetto into a beating the audience will surely snicker. In spite of all his bravado, Don Giovanni of the opera often takes on the aspect of the henpecked husband who attempts to philander—and unsuccessfully.

The most salient feature of this operatic Don Juan is that he is constantly foiled, although he has more free rein than in Tirso and at least as much as he has in any of the interim works. There are neither Tirso's Don Diego, nor Don Pedro, nor King, nor any strong male figures, as there are for example in Molière and Goldoni, to keep him in check or at least to admonish him. Mozart's foppish Ottavio is surely no threat; the Commendatore dies early in the first act; Leporello is wholly subservient; and the peasant Masetto, the only male capable of antagonizing Don Giovanni, is consumed by his own jealousy and too much handicapped by his low social status to be an effectual avenger or even reprover. It will be remembered that in Tirso, Doña Ana is the only one of the four female victims who escapes consummated ravishment by Don Juan, if his dying words to the statue can be believed: “A tu hija no ofendí, / Que vió mis engaños antes.” Apparently Don Juan has conquests in all the other versions, but in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni has not one single success! One has the impression that the libertine of the opera is playing the game for the fun of it, that he does not have to win to be satisfied. In other words, he is an amateur; and his catalogue, evaluated on the basis of his present accomplishments, is a fiction. He is not interested in Elvira, Anna informs Ottavio that she has resisted Don Giovanni successfully, as in Tirso, and Don Giovanni fails on each occasion to conquer the peasant girl Zerlina. The result is that Mozart's Don Juan fails to live up to his reputation and, furthermore, emerges from each situation as the burlador burlado. Indeed it seems incongruous to find in the opera a libertine who actually is jealous when, after the exchange of cloaks with his servant, Leporello makes love to Elvira with too much zeal. That Don Juan should experience jealousy at all is a serious alteration of his traditional character. So much does Tirso's tiger shrink to Mozart's mouse that only tradition justifies the intervention of the supernatural at the end. Mozart's Don Juan, therefore, cannot be the one definitive of Donjuanism in the popular concept, nor can his opera be as tragic as the overtones in the music suggest, or even as somber as many believe it to be.

Probably moved by their enthusiasm for the opera, some interpreters of Mozart, among them Edward Dent, Christopher Benn, and Pierre Jean Jouve, give one the impression that both the definitive form and popular conception of Don Juan stem from Mozart's Don Giovanni. Nothing could be farther from the truth in consideration of the little currency which opera in general enjoys, as well as the fact that Mozart's Don Juan does not match the popular concept of Don Juan. Even few opera-goers know that Giovanni is Italian for Juan, or rather, if they do know, they attach no significance to it. It follows that the majority of opera lovers, both lay students and musicians, know little of the history or meaning of the Don Juan legend which they are seeing enacted. Don Giovanni is heard as just another opera, not as the musical interpretation of a famous legend; and the audience does not recognize its own popular conception of a Don Juan, a “lady's man,” in Mozart's Don Giovanni, for it is not there.

What, then, is the origin of the popular concept of Don Juan, the hero, the suppressed ideal who is envied by men and to whom women are attracted? Surely it is not Tirso's play, little known even among Spaniards. Although the Don Juan of Molière has travelled somewhat farther than the other Don Juans, the rest of the many French Don Juans, like the German and Italian ones, are best known in their own regions, and little abroad except by literati. The English ones of Shaw and Byron are only points of departure for philosophical thought and have little to do with the traditional form of the legend. Mozart's opera Don Giovanni is probably the most universally-known version of the legend. Even though the Don Juan of Mozart is weaker, that is, less convincing as a tragic character, than the libertine of some of Mozart's predecessors, still because music can express better than literature all the necessary dash and vigor of Don Juan, the score gives the lines of the libretto a somewhat stronger libertine and, strong or weak, surely a picturesque one. Another picturesque and often-seen Don Juan is the Don Juan Tenorio of Zorrilla, the most popular Don Juan for Spanish-speaking people, being the expected dramatic presentation on the occasion of All Saints' Day, everywhere a national institution. Yet the fact is inescapable that Zorrilla's Don Juan is scarcely known outside of Spain and Spanish America. What remains, then, as the source of universal popular Donjuanism? Only the synthesis of all the various Don Juans. Don Juan of the popular concept is not derived from the opera, from Tirso, or from any one source, rather from all the sources together, and possibly with deeper roots in the folkloric aspects of the theme quite uninfluenced by any Don Juan play. This is evident when one considers that the man on the street's connotation for Don Juan, “lady's man,” has no basis in any one literary work.

The thesis proposed, therefore, is that neither Tirso's play nor Mozart's opera may be designated the single, or even principal, source from which the popular concept of Don Juan emanates. This concept is best approximated by the synthesis of all Don Juan works, and—most important of all—with an added increment of personality not to be found in any single work. In other words, no writer has yet portrayed the Don Juan whom you and I knew before we began to read books and hear operas.