Don juan

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Ildebrando D'Arcangelo as Don Giovanni , Salzburg Festival 2014

Don Juan ( Spanish ) or Don Giovanni ( Italian ) is the archetype of the womanizer in European poetry . The subject matter , which has often been taken up in the literature of the past centuries, is a classic subject of comparative literature and is seen as a southern European complement to the northern European Faust saga . The best-known representations are Molière's Don Juan , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni based on a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte and Søren Kierkegaard's religious, moral and erotic criticism in his debut work “ Either - Or ”.

material

While the Faust figure shows that overcoming the barriers set for inquiring people is a sacrilege and leads to ruin, the Don Juan saga condemns excessive indulgence in enjoyment of life. Both legends deal with human egoism, its reprehensibility and its transience ( vanitas ). This complex of motifs is characteristic of the Renaissance and Baroque . Similar to the Pygmalion fabric, bringing a statue to life plays a role, but this is not done voluntarily.

Idol

The Don Juan saga is older than the Faust saga. It is controversial whether it is linked to historical figures, according to legend, an admiral with the family name Tenorio from the class of the Hidalgos , who became known for his battles against the Moors, and his youngest son Juan. This legend makes don Juan a courtier of the Castilian king Pedro I , known as "the cruel", in whose deeds he was so involved that his name became the subject of the most adventurous and gruesome stories in Seville and the surrounding area. Most recently he is said to have tried to seduce a young Sevillian woman by the name of Giralda, and in this context killed her father, the city's governor, in a duel. When, in exuberance, he invited the stone statue erected for the governor for dinner, it really appeared and went to hell with him.

This legend was later mixed up with another about a nobleman with a similar name. This Juan de Mañara is said to have made an alliance with the devil , but after many misdeeds he converted and died in the state of holiness.

Material history

17.-18. century

The Don Juan material was in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 20th century was particularly interesting because it violated classicist poetics in that it could not be classified as either tragedy or comedy . The ständeklausel according to Don Juan would have a noble belong to the sphere of the tragedy, his base actions, however, can be difficult as a tragic justify, that puts him in the realm of comedy. This was not a problem in the medieval theater, in the Spanish and English Renaissance, and even later at the annual fairs , but it tended to become a scandal on the courtly stages since the 17th century, where nobles were supposed to act in an exemplary manner. Since the middle of the 18th century, Don Juan dramas that were strongly socially critical and criticized the nobility and their libertine were written .

The Don Juan saga is said to have been dramatically edited by an unknown poet at an early stage and performed in monasteries for a long time under the title El ateista fulminado . The first to portray her in the drama, whose name is well known, was the monk Gabriel Téllez, who lived under the name Tirso de Molina as a popular comedy poet in the first half of the 17th century and the productive subject under the title El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (“The seducer of Seville and the stone guest”) brought on stage. However, its authorship is not undisputed, as the piece is also attributed to Andrés de Claramonte (around 1580 to 1626). The Burlador de Sevilla was written around 1613, premiered in Madrid in 1624 , and first appeared in print in 1630.

Molina's play was revised by Antonio de Zamora himself in Spain at the end of the 17th century . It had already passed to Italy, first in Cicogninis ( Il convitato di pietra , 1650), then in O. Giliberti's adaptation (1652), who viewed the material as a comedy. From Italy it soon penetrated to France, where Dorimon first wrote an arrangement of the play by Giliberti under the title: Le festin de pierre, ou le fils criminel 1658 in Lyon, then de Villiers published such a "tragic comedy" in Paris in 1659 Brought stage. The subject aroused so much interest here that Molière adapted his Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre from it , which was performed for the first time in 1665 in the theater of the Palais Royal .

In the face of the jokes of the Italians, Molière wanted to elevate the subject to the sphere of courtly comedy, but in doing so, obliterated any trace of the Spanish drama in order not to appear old-fashioned. (At that time the “classical” French theater had overcome the “medieval” Spanish.) Thomas Corneille put the play in verse in 1677, and in this form it went on the French stages until the middle of the 19th century (1847). On the other hand, the actor Dumesnil (known as the poet Rosimond) understood the subject by making his tragicomedy Festin de pierre, ou l'athée foudroyé (1669) a decorative and spectacle piece and relocating the plot to pagan times to let his atheist brag with impunity. In England, too, the fabric was introduced by Shadwell's tragedy The libertine destroyed (1676), which caused a scandal.

Encouraged by Molière, 50 years later Goldoni also sought to present the old Spanish play to his fatherland in the worthy form of a regular comedy. It was first performed in Venice in 1736 under the title: Don Giovanni Tenorio, osia: il dissoluto punito ; However, Goldoni leaves out the stone guest entirely and hands over the office of vengeance to a bolt of lightning. Don Juan, or the stone banquet , has been part of the repertoire of improvising actors since the beginning of the 18th century, who seem to have used Dorimon's and Molière's pieces as well as the traditions of the Italians.

In addition to these dramatic arrangements, there were also musical ones: the material served as a template for opera pieces . The Frenchman Le Tellier made the first attempt in 1713 in Paris. In 1761 a ballet Don Juan with music by Christoph Willibald Gluck was performed in Vienna, and about twenty years later an opera of the same name, composed by Vincenzo Righini , was staged in Prague and elsewhere. Mozart left all these works far behind ; in his masterpiece Il dissoluto punito, ossía Don Giovanni (1787, based on Da Ponte's textbook), he gave the material the classical design that made it popular not only in Germany. Immediately before Mozart, Gazzaniga also wrote a one-act opera: Convitato di pietra , which was performed in Bergamo and Rome in 1787, and later in Milan and Paris. The subject even found its way into concert music: Boccherini's D minor symphony "La casa del diavolo" (G 506) is inspired by Gluck's ballet Don Juan and the subject matter of the subject.

19th century

In the 19th century the Don Juan saga remained a favorite object of poetic treatment. Lord Byron's epic poem Don Juan , however, only ties in with the name of the hero and, by the way, distances itself completely from the legend. On the other hand, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, in his tragedy Don Juan and Faust (1829), tries to connect the old southern folk legend with the Faust legend of the north, as happened in many popular versions at the fairs. What was new was that such a play could rightly be considered a tragedy. The social problem had eased somewhat and the human issue came to the fore. Other Don Juan dramas were written by Karl von Holtei (1834), Sigismund Wiese (1840), and Karl Johann Braun Ritter von Braunthal (1842). Even Nikolaus Lenau left a (unfinished) epic poem Don Juan full of dramatic precision and brilliant audacity of thought.

Under the title Don Giovanni o Il convitato di pietra , the subject was once again designed as an opera by Giovanni Pacini in 1832 . In France, the saga was also treated repeatedly by more recent poets, sometimes dramatically, such as Alexandre Dumas ( Don Juan de Maraña , 1836), sometimes as a novel, such as by Mérimée (1834), Mallefille (1858) and others. Spain itself enriched the Don Juan poetry with José Zorrilla's drama Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Just as Goethe gave the Faust saga a conciliatory twist that ran counter to popular belief but was founded on the advancing consciousness of the time, so in the Zorilla drama the Don Juan saga, without the material essentially changing, first becomes completely modern Mind treated. The same poet also worked on the subject epically and lyrically in El desafio del diablo (1845) and Un testigo di bronze (1845). However, don Juan was rarely given a fundamental upgrade from villain to hero, as Faust sometimes experienced.

As a further link in this chain of poems, Paul Heyses can only be mentioned, of course, in the drama Don Juan's Ende (1883), which is linked to the old legend . Another well-known work is the tone poem Don Juan by Richard Strauss from 1889, with which he found his own style and which is at the beginning of his career. Richard Strauss was primarily based on Nikolaus Lenaus' Don Juan poem, which has remained a fragment.

Based on his posthumously published memoir " Histoire de ma vie " , Giacomo Casanova joined Don Juan as a popular seductive figure in 1822 .

20th century

Other authors who have taken on the material are:

In Gaston Leroux's novel Das Phantom der Oper (1908-1910) a fictional opera composed by the Phantom named Don Juan triomphant (German: "Don Juan, the winner") is mentioned. Andrew Lloyd Webber's Musical (1986) contains excerpts from this opera (under the English title Don Juan Triumphant ), with Webber and the librettist Heart lending their pen to the phantom.

21st century

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Eidenbenz: Luigi Boccherini's "La Casa del diavolo" . In: Tex dump .
  2. ↑ Baudelaire, Charles: "Don Juan aux Enfers", in: ders .: Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Livre de Poche , 1999, pp. 64/65.

literature

  • Hiltrud Gnüg: Don Juan. An introduction . Artemis-Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7608-1339-9 .
  • Esther van Loo: Le vrai Don Juan. Don Miguel de Mañara . SFELT, Paris 1950
  • Armand E. Singer : The Don Juan theme. An annotated bibliography of versions, analogues uses and adaptions . West Virginia University Press, Morgantown, W. Va. 1993, ISBN 0-937058-32-7 .
  • Leo Weinstein: The metamorphoses of Don Juan . AMS Press, Stanford, Calif. 1978, ISBN 0-404-51828-1 .
  • Brigitte Wittmann (Ed.): Don Juan. Representation and interpretation . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1976, ISBN 3-534-04962-4 .
  • Daniela Sommer: The Myth of Don Juan in Opera and Theater from the 17th to the 20th Century. Tectum, Marburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8288-9676-5 .
  • Andreas Bukowski: Don Juan. Fabric and figure. ars una, Neuried 2009, ISBN 978-3-89391-160-8 .
  • Hanns-Josef Ortheil: The Night of Don Juan. btb, 2002, ISBN 3-442-72478-3 .
  • Günter Helmes , Petra Hennecke: Don Juan. 50 German-language variations of a European myth . Paderborn 1994. (Again: Hamburg 2011), ISBN 978-3-927104-68-6 .
  • Günter Helmes: "What is going on with me? Where am I? What do I want?" A typology of German-language Don Juan texts between Lenau and Frisch. In: Helmut Kreuzer (ed.): Don Juan and Femme fatale . Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7705-2986-3 , pp. 59-97.
  • Gerhard Katschnig: Don Juan between Madrid and Prague. In: The Art of Dialogue. Commemorative letter for Michael Fischer. Edited by Stephan Kirste et al. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3631663790 , pp. 109–118.

See also

Web links

Commons : Don Juan  - collection of images, videos and audio files