the visitor again and again, and still again.  Don Giovanni remains unshaken in his wicked fortitude.  At length he wrests his hand out of the stony grasp and at the moment hears his doom from the stony lips, “Ah! the time for you is past!” Darkness enwraps him; the earth trembles; supernatural voices proclaim his punishment in chorus; a pit opens before him, from which demons emerge and drag him down to hell.

Here the opera ends for us; but originally, after the catastrophe the persons of the play, all but the reprobate whom divine justice has visited, returned to the scene to hear a description of the awful happenings he had witnessed from the buffoon who had hidden under the table, to dispose their plans for the future (for Ottavio and Anna, marriage in a year; for Masetto and Zerlina, a wedding instanter; for Elvira, a nunnery), and platitudinously to moralize that, the perfidious wretch having been carried to the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, naught remained to do save to sing the old song, “Thus do the wicked find their end, dying as they had lived.”

Footnotes: 

{1} See my preface to “Don Giovanni” in the Schirmer Collection of Operas.

{2} Gounod.

{3} “The Life of Mozart,” by Otto Jahn, Vol.  III, p. 169.

{4} “Mozart’s Don Giovanni,” by Charles Gounod, p. 3.

CHAPTER V

“Fidelio”

It was the scalawag Schikaneder who had put together the singular dramatic phantasmagoria known as Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” and acted the part of the buffoon in it, who, having donned the garb of respectability, commissioned Beethoven to compose the only opera which that supreme master gave to the world.  The opera is “Fidelio,” and it occupies a unique place in operatic history not only because it is the only work of its kind by the greatest tone-poet that ever lived, but also because of its subject.  The lyric drama has dealt with the universal passion ever since the art-form was invented, but “Fidelio” is the only living opera which occurs to me now, except Gluck’s “Orfeo” and “Alceste,” which hymns the pure love of married lovers.  The bond between the story of Alcestis, who goes down to death to save the life of Admetus, and that of Leonore, who ventures her life to save Florestan, is closer than that of the Orphic myth, for though the alloy only serves to heighten the sheen of Eurydice’s virtue, there is yet a grossness in the story of Aristaeus’s unlicensed passion which led to her death, that strongly differentiates it from the modern tale of wifely love and devotion.  Beethoven was no ascetic, but he was as sincere and severe a moralist in life as he was in art.  In that most melancholy of human documents, written at Heiligenstadt in October, 1802, commonly known as his will, he says to his brothers:  “Recommend to your children virtue; it alone can bring happiness, not money.  I speak from experience.  It was virtue which bore me up in time of trouble; to her, next to my art, I owe thanks for my not having laid violent hands on myself.”