discovery to her lover, Don Ottavio; Elvira joins them, and the three vow vengeance against the libertine.  Don Giovanni gives a ball in honour of Zerlina’s marriage, and in the course of the festivities seizes an opportunity of trying to seduce her.  He is only stopped by the interference of Anna, Elvira, and Ottavio, who have made their way into his palace in masks and dominoes.  In the next act the vengeance of the three conspirators appears to hang fire a little, for Don Giovanni is still pursuing his vicious courses, and employing Leporello to beguile the too trustful Elvira.  After various escapades he finds himself before the statue of the murdered Commandant.  He jokingly invites his old antagonist to sup with him, an invitation which the statue, to his intense surprise, hastens to accept.  Leporello and his master return to prepare for the entertainment of the evening.  When the merriment is at its height, a heavy step is heard in the corridor, and the marble man enters.  Don Giovanni is still undaunted, and even when his terrible visitor offers him the choice between repentance and damnation, yields not a jot of his pride and insolence.  Finally the statue grasps him by the hand and drags him down, amid flames and earthquakes, to eternal torment.

The taste of Mozart’s time would not permit the drama to finish here.  All the other characters have to assemble once more.  Leporello gives them an animated description of his master’s destruction, and they proceed to draw a most edifying moral from the doom of the sinner.  The music to this finale is of matchless beauty and interest, but modern sentiment will not hear of so grievous an anti-climax, and the opera now usually ends with Don Giovanni’s disappearance.

The music of ‘Don Giovanni’ has so often been discussed, that brief reference to its more salient features will be all that is necessary.  Gounod has written of it:  ’The score of “Don Giovanni” has influenced my life like a revelation.  It stands in my thoughts as an incarnation of dramatic and musical impeccability,’ and lesser men will be content to echo his words.  The plot is less dramatically coherent than that of ’Le Nozze di Figaro,’ but it ranges over a far wider gamut of human feeling.  From the comic rascality of Leporello to the unearthly terrors of the closing scene is a vast step, but Mozart is equally at home in both.  His incomparable art of characterisation is here displayed in even more consummate perfection than in the earlier work.  The masterly way in which he differentiates the natures of his three soprani—­Anna, a type of noble purity; Elvira, a loving and long-suffering woman, alternating between jealous indignation and voluptuous tenderness; and Zerlina, a model of rustic coquetry—­may especially be remarked, but all the characters are treated with the same profound knowledge of life and human nature.  Even in his most complicated concerted pieces he never loses grip of the idiosyncrasies of his characters, and in the most piteous and tragic situations he never relinquishes for a moment his pure ideal of intrinsic musical beauty.  If there be such a thing as immortality for any work of art, it must surely be conceded to ’Don Giovanni.’