Don Juan
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
The Don Juan of Molière is, unquestionably, a rake, but first and foremost he is a man of the world; before giving way to the irresistible inclination that attracts him to pretty women, he feels that he must conform to a certain ideal standard, he seeks to be the type of man that would be most admired at the court of a young king of gallantry and parts. The Don Juan of Mozart is already more true to nature, and less French, he thinks less of _what other people will say_; his first care is not for appearances, is not _parestre_, to quote d'Aubigné's Baron de Foeneste. We have but two portraits of the Italian Don Juan, as he must have appeared, in that fair land, in the sixteenth century, in the dawn of the new civilisation. Of these two portraits, there is one which I simply cannot display, our generation is too straitlaced; one has to remind oneself of that great expression which I used often to hear Lord Byron repeat: "This age of cant." This tiresome form of hypocrisy, which takes in no one, has the great advantage of giving fools something to say: they express their horror that people have ventured to mention this, or to laugh at that, etc. Its disadvantage is that it vastly restricts the field of history. If the reader has the good taste to allow me, I intend to offer him, in all humility, an historical notice of the second of these Don Juans, of whom it is possible to speak in 1837; his name was Francesco Cenci."--The Cenci (1837) by Stendhal |
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Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine and seducer who debuted in the Spanish proto-picaresque novel The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (c. 1630), whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for "womanizer." He is the male counterpart of the femme fatale.
El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630. Evidence suggests it is the first written version of the Don Juan legend. Among the best known works about this character today are Molière's play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1821), José de Espronceda's poem El estudiante de Salamanca (1840) and José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio (1844). The most influential version of all is Don Giovanni, an opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787 (with Giacomo Casanova probably in the audience) and itself the source of inspiration for works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Søren Kierkegaard, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Camus.
Don Juan is used synonymously for "womanizer", especially in Spanish slang, and the term Don Juanism is sometimes used as a synonym for satyriasis.
Intertextuality between Faust and Don Juan
- "Certainly Faust is a reproduction of Don Juan. ... Like Don Juan, Faust is a demonic figure, but at a higher level." --Either/Or, Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, who had been working up a project on the three great medieval figures of Don Juan, Faust and Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew), abandoned his project, although he later incorporated much of the work he had done into Either/Or.
The literary characters that most influenced Kierkegaard were Don Juan (representing pleasure), Faust (doubt) and the Wandering Jew (despair), and that he used characters based on them in his writings. For example, both Don Juan and Faust personify the demonic in Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Part One.
L'homme fatal
Men who are fatal include Don Juan, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, most of the heroes in Lord Byron's books (termed the "Byronic hero"), as well as such diverse characters as Billy Budd, Count Dracula, Tadzio in Death in Venice, Harthouse in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Georges Querelle in Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest, James Bond, and Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley" novels.
Chronology of works derived from the story of Don Juan
- 1630: Tirso de Molina's play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra
- 1643: Paolo Zehentner's play Promontorium Malae Spei
- 1650: Giacinto Andrea Cicognini's play Il convitato di pietra
- 1658: Dorimon (Nicolas Drouin's) Le festin de pierre, ou le fils criminel
- 1659: Jean Deschamps, Sieur de Villiers's play Le Festin de Pierre ou le Fils criminel
- 1665: Molière's comedy Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre
- 1669: Rosimon's Festin de pierre, ou l’athée foudroyé
- 1676: Thomas Shadwell's play The Libertine
- 17th century: L'ateista fulminato, Italian play by unknown author
- 1714?: Antonio de Zamora's play No hay plazo que no se cumpla ni deuda que no se pague o convidado de piedra
- 1730: Antonio Denzio's opera La pravità castigata, with music mainly by Antonio Caldara
- 1736: Carlo Goldoni's play Don Giovanni Tenorio ossia Il dissoluto
- 1761: Christoph Willibald Gluck's and Gasparo Angiolini's ballet Don Juan
- 1776: Vincenzo Righini's opera Il convitato di pietra
- 1787: Giovanni Bertati's opera Don Giovanni, music by Giuseppe Gazzaniga
- 1787: Lorenzo da Ponte's opera Don Giovanni, music by Mozart
- 1813: E.T.A. Hoffmann's novella Don Juan (later collected in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier)
- 1821: Byron's epic poem Don Juan
- 1829: Christian Dietrich Grabbe's play Don Juan und Faust
- 1830: Pushkin's play Каменный гость (Kamenny Gost', The Stone Guest) set as an opera in 1872
- 1831: Alexandre Dumas' play Don Juan de Maraña
- 1834: Prosper Mérimée's novella Les âmes du Purgatoire
- 1840: José de Espronceda's El estudiante de Salamanca
- 1841: Franz Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan on themes from the Mozart opera
- 1843: Søren Kierkegaard's Either/or in which he discusses Mozart's musical interpretation of Don Giovanni
- 1844: Nikolaus Lenau's play Don Juan
- 1844: José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio
- 1857: Charles Baudelaire's poem Don Juan aux enfers (Don Juan in Hell) in Les Fleurs du Mal
- 1862: Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's verse drama Don Juan
- 1872: Alexander Dargomyzhsky's opera The Stone Guest after Puskin
- 1874: Guerra Junqueiro's poem A morte de D. João
- 1878: The Finding of Don Juan by Haidee, painting by Ford Madox Brown
- 1883: Paul Heyse's "Don Juans Ende"
- 1888: Richard Strauss' symphonic poem Don Juan
- 1903: George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman; the third act's dream sequence is often played by itself as Don Juan in Hell
- 1902–1905: Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Las sonatas
- 1906 : Ruperto Chapí's opera Margarita la tornera, based on José Zorrilla's dramatic poem. This features a seducer of women known as Don Juan Alarcon.
- 1907: Guillaume Apollinaire's novel Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan
- 1910: Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of the Opera, which includes an opera called Don Juan Triumphant.
- 1910–1912: Aleksandr Blok's The Commander's Footsteps (Шаги командора).
- 1912: Lesya Ukrainka's Stone Host (Кам'яний господар), a dramatic poem.
- 1913: Jacinto Grau's play Don Juan de Carillana; also, the play El burlador que no se burla (1927) and the essay Don Juan en el tiempo y en el espacio (1954)
- 1921: Edmond Rostand's play La dernière nuit de Don Juan
- 1922: Azorín's Don Juan
- 1926: Ramón Pérez de Ayala's novel and play Tigre Juan
- 1926: Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, silent film with Vitaphone soundtrack.
- ?: Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero's play Don Juan
- 1932: short story Don Juan's Confession in Karel Čapek's Apocryphal Tales (Kniha apokryfů)
- 1934: Miguel de Unamuno's Don Juan
- 1934: The Private Life of Don Juan, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.'s last film
- 1934–1949: André Obey: Don Juan
- 1936: Ödön von Horváth's Don Juan kommt aus dem Krieg (Don Juan comes back from the war)
- 1938: Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel "After the Death of Don Juan"
- 1940: Le Mythe de Sisyphe:Albert Camus. Published by Librarire Gallimard (1942) and by Alfred A. Knopf (1955, 1983) and First Vintage International Editions (1991) in English as The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays. In Camus' anti-suicide treatise, Don Juan is one of three 'Absurd Men', 'heroes' who overcome life with their attitude.
- 1942: Paul Goodman's novel Don Juan or, The Continuum of the Libido, edited by Taylor Stoehr, 1979.
- 1942: Franz Zeise's novel Don Juan Tenorio
- 1944: Josef Toman Don Juan
- 1946: Suzanne Lilar, play "Le Burlador", an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis.
- 1949: Adventures of Don Juan, film starring Errol Flynn
- 1950: Don Juan, film directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia
- 1952: "A Story of Don Juan", a short ghost story by V.S. Pritchett
- 1953: Max Frisch's Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie; also Nachträgliches zu Don Juan
- 1954: Ronald Frederick Duncan's play Don Juan
- 1955: Ingmar Bergman's play Don Juan
- 1956: Buddy Holly's song Modern Don Juan
- 1957: Georges Bataille's novel "Blue of Noon", an adaptation of the Don Juan story set in 1930s fascist Europe
- 1958: Henry de Montherlant's play Don Juan
- 1959: Roger Vailland's play Monsieur Jean
- 1960: Ingmar Bergman film Djävulens öga(The Devil's Eye)
- 1963: Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's novel Don Juan
- 1969: Jan Švankmajer's Don Šajn (Don Juan); a short retelling of the Don Juan legend featuring live-action, stop-motion animation, and marionettes.
- 1969/1970: Donna Juanita, a song performed by Swedish artist Monica Zetterlund, part of the revue and TV-show "Spader, Madame!" by comedians Hasseåtage, based on a musical piece by Franz Schubert (Sixth Symphony, Second Movement) - the theme of the lyrics is to show the gender inequality in the fact that Don Juan's philandering behaviour would never have been accepted in a woman
- 1970: The Stoned Guest, a half-act opera by P. D. Q. Bach
- 1973: Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme..., a film starring Brigitte Bardot
- 1974: Derek Walcott's play, The Joker of Seville
- 1975: Lars Gyllensten's novel I skuggan av Don Juan (In the shadow of Don Juan)
- 1977: Joni Mitchell's song and album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
- 1980: New York City no-wave artists Mars and DNA recorded a collaborative opera based on Don Giovanni entitled John Gavanti
- 1985: A comparison is made between Marius (a main character who falls in love) and Don Juan in Les Misérables (by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg).
- 1987: In the Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical "The Phantom Of the Opera", the Phantom both writes and stars in a fictional opera named "Don Juan Triumphant."
- 1987: Post-minimalist composer Elodie Lauten wrote an opera based on a feminist variation of the legend entitled "The Death of Don Juan"
- 1988: The Pet Shop Boys song "Don Juan", which used the story as a metaphor for the seduction of the Balkans by Nazism during the 1930s
- 1990: Almeida Faria's novel O Conquistador (The Conqueror).
- 1991: Georges Pichard'sExploits d'un Don Juan, comic from Apollinaire's novel
- 1992: The song, "The Statue Got Me High" by They Might Be Giants, is a contemporary, semi-abstract retelling of Don Giovanni.
- 1995: Don Juan DeMarco, film starring Johnny Depp in the role of Don Juan, and also starring Marlon Brando
- 1997: David Ives' comedy Don Juan in Chicago
- 2000: Rancid song, Don Giovani.
- 2003: Gregory Maupin's play Don Juan, A Comedy (a new adaptation)
- 2004: Peter Handke's novel Don Juan (erzählt von ihm selbst) ("Don Juan (Told by Himself)")
- 2004: Georgi Gospodnov's play D.J.
- 2005: José Saramago's play Don Giovanni ou O Dissoluto Absolvido (Don Giovanni or The Dissolute Acquitted).
- 2005: Jim Jarmusch's film Broken Flowers.
- 2006: Andrzej Bart's novel Don Juan raz jeszcze (Don Juan: once again)
- 2006: Joel Beers' play The Don Juan Project (an examination of the myth's relevance in contemporary times)
- 2006: Don Juan in Soho, a play by Patrick Marber
- 2007: Douglas Carlton Abrams' novel The Lost Diary of Don Juan
- 2008 Cinque variazioni sul "Don Giovanni" di Da Ponte-Mozart, five plays of Vittorio Caratozzolo
- 2008 - 2009: Emma Rice's play Don John
There is also a book from Jozef Toman with name The life and death of don Miguel de Manara. Both the Flynn and Fairbanks versions turn Don Juan into a likeable rogue, rather than the heartless seducer that he is usually presented as being. The Flynn movie even has him successfully foiling a treasonous plot in the Spanish royal court. Shaw's play turns him into a philosophical character who enjoys contemplating the purpose of life. Beers' play turns him into a poetic, epic character recoiling from the debasing popular image of womanizer and cheap lover.