08-don-juan-myth.pdf

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Legacy of Don Juan Myth

dn von Horvth and Austrian stamp honouring his memory

Don Juan Comes Back from the Wartakes advantage of the long tradition of Don Juan asa literary character. Depending on how precise one wants to be with drawingconnections between one work and another, there are somewhere between 1700 and 2000different variations on the character and story. Models that were a direct influence onHorvath were Schnitzlers playAnatoland novel Casanova Comes Home, MoliresDonJuan, Mozarts operaDon Giovanni, and Lord Byrons Epic poemDon Juan. ArthurSchnitzler (1862-1931) was an Austro-Hungarian playwright and essayist whose worksfocused on the hypocrisy of social behavior and human desire. Casanova Comes Home isabout an aged Casanova who refuses to reform, is still loved by his old mistresses butwants to seduce young virtuous women instead. Schnitzler was demonized by the pressin Austria and became a role model for young avant-garde playwrights. MoliresDonJuan was written to replace Tartuffe, which had met with displeasure from the FrenchAcademy.Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre is in many ways an even more challengingplay than Tartuffe,but because its hero is punished for his sins at the end of the play itwas received as acceptable.

Arthur Schnitzler Jean Baptiste Poquelin (Molire)

The most consistent feature of Don Juans character, whatever the literary mode or era, ishis ability to seduce women, but there are other aspects to the legend that recur. He is


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usually a warrior as well as a lover. He is a libertine in his overall world view, not onlyopenly and unapologetically making love to many women, but also espousing atheismand poilitically radical philosophies. The women that Don Juan seduces are typically ofall possible varieties. Don Juan does not confine himself to a specific class or age.Mozart and Da Ponte captured this quality of the character in the servant Leporellos

List Aria fromDon Giovanni.

Leporello:My dear lady, this is a list

Of the beauties my master has loved,A list which I have compiled.Observe, read along with me.

In Italy, six hundred and forty;In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;

A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;In Spain already one thousand and three.

Among these are peasant girls,Maidservants, city girls,

Countesses, baronesses,

Marchionesses, princesses,Women of every rank,

Every shape, every age.With blondes it is his habitTo praise their kindness;

In brunettes, their faithfulness;In the very blond, their sweetness.

In winter he likes fat ones.In summer he likes thin ones.He calls the tall ones majestic.

The little ones are always charming.

He seduces the old onesFor the pleasure of adding to the list.

His greatest favouriteIs the young beginner.

It doesn't matter if she's rich,Ugly or beautiful;

If she wears a petticoat,You know what he does.

Mozarts version of Don Juan is particularly relevant to Horvaths play. Don JuanComes Back from the Warbegins with operetta singers and includes a scene at the opera

whereDon Giovanni is being performed. Horvath actually wrote a play entitledFigaroGets Divorcedin which the characters from The Marriage of Figaro (another comicopera by Mozart) are imagined in the revolutionary period that followed their frivolousstory.

Leporellos aria reminds us that Don Juan almost always has a male companion, usually aservant. The narrator of Byrons entire epic rcounts the story to the poet laureate ofBritain at the time, Robert Southey (an aesthetic enemy satirized by Byron in the poem).


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In Molires version Sganarelle, the equivalent of Leporello, begins and ends the play.Don Juan Comes Back from the Waris unusual because Don Juan is the only man. Thereis no male listener or admirer to receive the tale of his exploits. The lack of a sidekick,servant or other male comrade in Horvaths version sets it apart from the bulk of DonJuans over the centuries because although the author was a male, the play is a female

fantasy more than a tale of masculine sexual exploits.

Although the Don Juan tradition has distinct misogynist features, there is also a recurringproto-feminist sub-text in which Don Juan gives women freedom that other men represseven as he robs them of their virtue. Horvath takes the Don Juan myth and puts it in atwentieth-century, post-WWI context. Most men have died in the war, economicdepression ravages the lives of the survivors and previous notions of social and sexualmores have been altered forever. In this topsy-turvy modern world, Don Juan is both outof place as an aristocratic lothario and in his element as the object of universal femalefantasy.

Here is an incomplete list of adaptations of the Don Juan story:

1630: Tirso de Molina writes the play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest

Tirso de Molina

1665: Molire's comedyDom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre

1676: Thomas Shadwells play The Libertine is basically Molires version put intoEnglish.

1736: Carlo Goldoni's playDon Giovanni Tenorio, or the Libertine

1761: Christoph Willibald Gluck and Gasparo Angiolini's balletDon Juan

1787: Giovanni Bertati's operaDon Giovanni, music by Giuseppe Gazzaniga

1787: Lorenzo da Ponte's operaDon Giovanni, music by Mozart


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MozartsDon Giovanni

1813: E.T.A. Hoffmann's novellaDon Juan

1821: Byron's epic poemDon Juan satirizes Romantic literary and poetic tradition aswell as feminism, religion, and European politics.

I want a hero: an uncommon want,When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan

We all have seen him, in the pantomime,Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

Lord Byron in oriental costume, by Philip Thomas

1829: Christian Dietrich Grabbes playDon Juan and Faust

1830: Pushkins play The Stone Guest

1831: Alexandre Dumas playDon Juan de Maraa


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1844: Nikolaus Lenaus playDon Juan

1844: Jos Zorrillas playDon Juan Tenorio

1861: Charles Baudelaires poemDon Juan in Hell

1862: Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoys verse dramaDon Juan

1872: Alexander Dargomyzhskys opera The Stone Guest

1888: Richard Strauss symphonic poemDon Juan

1893: Schnitzlers playAnatolis an episodic play about an upper middle classAustrian libertine and his petty love affairs.

1903: George Bernard Shaws playMan and Superman has a rarely performed

section of the third act entitledDon Juan in Hell. It is a dream sequence in which themain character from the 1906 core plot, John Tanner, imagines himself as Don Juanand debates the plays essential themes with the Devil.

1906 : Ruperto Chaps operaMargarita la tornera, based on Jos Zorrillas dramaticpoem. This features a seducer of women known as Don Juan Alarcon.

1907: Guillaume Apollinaires novelAdventures of a Young Don Juan

1912: Aleksandr Bloks The Commanders Footsteps. Blok was initially a part of theRussian Symbolist movement, which stressed a kind of new-age Goddess worship, but

became disillusioned with the movements naivet and moved toward the artistic andpolitical avant garde.

A thick, heavy curtain at the door,Mist beyond the nighttime window.Now that you know fear, Don JuanWhats your hateful freedom worth?

Cold and empty is the lavish bedroom,Servants sleep in the still night.

From a blissful, foreign, distant landComes a roosters song.

What are sounds of bliss to a betrayerWhen his time is up?Donna Anna sleeps, arms crossed above her heart,

Donna Annas dreaming...

When his cruel features have frozen,Echoed within mirrors?

Anna, Anna, is the graves sleep sweet?Is it sweet to have unearthly dreams?


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Life is empty, crazy , fathomless!Step outside to fight, old fate!

And in answer smitten and triumphant A horn sounds in snowy darkness...

Splashing light into the night, a carRushes by, as black and quiet as an owl.

With his quiet, heavy footstepsThe Commander steps inside the house...

The door gapes. Through the excessive frostHoarsely like the tolling of the midnight clocks

The hour tolls: You called me here to dinner.I have come. Are you prepared?

To this brutal question theres no answer,Theres no answer, only silence.

Frightening at daybreak is the lavish bedroom,Servants sleep in the pale night.

Cold and strange is break of dayNight is dim at break of day.

Bride of Light! O, Donna Anna where are you,?Anna! Anna! Only silence.

In the horrifying morning mistThe hour tolls one final time:

In your dying hour Donna Anna will arise.Anna will arise in the hour of your death.

1913: Jacinto Graus playDon Juan de Carillana; also, the playEl burlador que nose burla (1927) and the essayDon Juan en el tiempo y en el espacio (1954)

1918 Shnitzler publishes the short novel Casanova comes Home

1921: Edmond Rostands play The Last Night of Don Juan

1926:Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, silent film with Vitaphone soundtrack.

1934: The Private Life of Don Juan is a film directed by Alex Korda starring DouglasFairbanks that was based on a French play about an aging Don Juan who returns toSeville and is not recognised because he does not match the fantasy figure.


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Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

1942: Paul Goodmans novelDon Juan or, The Continuum of the Libido, edited byTaylor Stoehr, 1979.

1946: Suzanne Lilar, play The Liar, an original reinterpretation of the myth of DonJuan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychologicalanalysis.

1949: The Adventures of Don Juan is a film starring Errol Flynn directed by VincentSherman with music by Max Steiner. It was an effort to recreate Flynns success asRobin Hood and conflates the two mythical characters. Don Juan falls in love withthe queen of Spain and helps train a generation of young men in the art of fencing.Don Juan as Libertine is only relevant in the opening and closing scenes. For most ofthe film he is portrayed as an honorable and patriotic hero.

Publicity forThe Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn


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1956: Buddy Hollys songModern Don Juan is the lovers lament that he wants onlyone girl but women wont leave him alone.

1960: Ingmar Bergman film The Devils Eye was adapted from a radio play in whichthe devil allows Don Juan out of hell to seduce a clergymans daughter.

Publicity forThe Devils Eye

1971Jacques and his Masteris a theatrical treatment by Milan Kundera of a novel byDenis Diderot. It is a reversal of the stypical Don Juan material because the servant isthe lothario and the master is sexually nave.

1973:Don Juan, or If Don Juan was a Woman a French film directed by RogerVadim and starring Brigitte Bardot. Although this version presents Don Juan as awoman the film is construced as a confession so she tells her exploits to a malelistener.

Contrasting advertising strategies forDon Juan, or if Don Juan Were a Woman


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Brigitte Bardot as a female Don Juan gesturing as in repentance, yet in her underwear!

1975: Lars Gyllensten's novelIn the shadow of Don Juan

1990: Almeida Faria's novel O Conquistador(The Conqueror).

1995:Don Juan DeMarco, film starring Johnny Depp in the role of a young man whoimagines himself to be Don Juan and the psychologist who gets seduced by thefantasies of his patient.

Johnny Depp in publicity forDon Juan DeMarco

1997: David Ives' comedyDon Juan in Chicago

2003: Gregory Maupin's playDon Juan, a Comedy

2004: Peter Handke's novelDon Juan Told by Himself

2004: Georgi Gospodnov's playD.J.

2005: Jos Saramago's playDon Giovanni or The Dissolute Acquitted.


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2005: Jim Jarmusch's filmBroken Flowers depicts am aging, modern Don Juan whohas a sadness and longing for love that is reminiscent of Horvaths play.

Bill Murray as modern Don Juan in Broken Flowers

2006: Joel Beers' play The Don Juan Project

2006:Don Juan in Soho is a play by Patrick Marber set in contemporary London.Don Juan exposes the hypocrisy in contemporary society, but is ultimately destroyedin graphic, bloody fashion. Marbers Don Juan is not consumed by devils so much asdevilish humans.

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