coupled with the speedily acquired popularity of Garcia’s gifted daughter, was probably the reason why an English version of the opera which dominated the New York stage for nearly a quarter of a century soon appeared at the Chatham Theatre.  In this version the part of the dissolute Don was played by H. Wallack, uncle of the Lester Wallack so long a theatrical favorite in the American metropolis.  As Malibran the Signorina Garcia took part in many of the English performances of the work, which kept the Italian off the local stage till 1850, when it was revived by Max Maretzek at the Astor Place Opera-house.

I have intimated that Bertati’s opera-book was the prototype of Da Ponte’s, but the story is centuries older than either.  The Spanish tale of Don Juan Tenorio, who killed an enemy in a duel, insulted his memory by inviting his statue to dinner, and was sent to hell because of his refusal to repent him of his sins, was but a literary form of a legend of considerable antiquity.  It seems likely that it was moulded into dramatic shape by monks in the Middle Ages; it certainly occupied industriously the minds of playwrights in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spain, Italy, Germany, and England.  The most eminent men who treated it at various times were the Spaniard known as Tirza di Molina, the Frenchman Moliere, the Italian Goldoni, and the Englishman Thomas Shadwell, whose “Libertine Destroyed” was brought forward in 1676.  Before Mozart, Le Tellier had used it for a French comic opera, Righini and Gazzaniga for Italian operas, and Gluck for a ballet.

But we are concerned now only with the play as Da Ponte and Mozart gave it to us.  In the dramatic terminology of the eighteenth century “Don Giovanni” was a dramma giocoso; in the better sense of the phrase, a playful drama—­a lyric comedy.  Da Ponte conceived it as such, but Mozart gave it so tragical a turn by the awful solemnity with which he infused the scene of the libertine’s punishment that already in his day it was felt that the last scene as written and composed to suit the conventional type of a comic opera was an intolerable anticlimax.  Mozart sounds a deeply tragical note at the outset of his overture.  The introduction is an Andante, which he drew from the scene of the opera in which the ghostly statue of the murdered Commandant appears to Don Giovanni while he is enjoying the pleasures of the table.  Two groups of solemn chords command attention and “establish at once the majestic and formidable authority of divine justice, the avenger of crime.” {2} They are followed by a series of solemn progressions in stern, sinister, unyielding, merciless, implacable harmonies.  They are like the colossal strides of approaching Fate, and this awfulness is twice raised to a higher power, first by a searching, syncopated phrase in the violins which hovers loweringly over them, and next by a succession of afrighted minor scales ascending crescendo and descending piano, the change in dynamics beginning abruptly as the crest of each terrifying wave is reached.  These wonderful scales begin thus:—­