Don Juan

The mythical seducer Don Juan appeared in 1630 under the pen of Tirso de Molina. It will be taken up and recreated by many writers including Molière, Lorenzo Da Ponte (author of the libretto Don Giovanni for Mozart), Byron, Hoffmann, Musset, Mérimée and Dumas.

Don Juan

“Don Juan lives in the enjoyment of the present moment and imposes himself as the individual opposing the God who created him. It embodies the power of erotic desire by opposing Christian morality which requires marriage to precede and frame the satisfaction of this desire. Don Juan represents the omnipotence of the individual in the face not only of any oppression but even more so in the face of any form of authority, whether divine or social.

The first version of myth: “a character filled with sovereign sensuality”

The first version of the myth that fully develops the characteristics of the character is the work of Tirso de Molina, El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra, published in 1630. Don Juan is defined by this work as a character defying the authorities and the society of his time by refusing to submit to the moral codes that prevailed then and by postponing his repentance.

Character filled with a sovereign sensuality, not atheist but little interested in the Catholic religion, he pursues and deceives many women before repenting in front of the flames of hell. It symbolizes an erotic outburst that opposes the gallant discourse of the chilled lover.

He lives in the enjoyment of the present moment and imposes himself as the individual opposing the God who created him. It embodies the power of erotic desire by opposing Christian morality which requires marriage to precede and frame the satisfaction of this desire. Don Juan represents the omnipotence of the individual in the face not only of any oppression but even more so in the face of any form of authority, whether divine or social.

It is fundamentally opposed to the charity advocated by the Catholic Church and to the duties imposed by social life. It places the individual above the general, above society. He removed from his life the duties towards his fellow men, estimating that the only duty of man is to ensure his self a blossoming without limits.

"Don Juan becomes, through Molière's play, an atheist libertine, a great hypocrite lord".

To this first version of Don Juan Spanish followed by Italian variants which do not bring important changes as far as the figure of Don Juan is concerned. The seventeenth-century French works of Villiers and Dorimon prepare the most important version of the Don Juan myth since its creation, that of Molière, which appeared in 1665.

He becomes, through Molière's play, an atheist libertine, a great hypocrite lord. He is a cynical and cold character who no longer seeks the simple enjoyment of life but wishes to manipulate the men around him, dishonor the women who pass within his reach and assert his superiority. His pride is based on his high birth. More than his intrinsically sensual nature which, in Tirso's Don Juan, seduced immediately, Molière's Don Juan implements a rhetoric of seduction to attract the woman he desires. It also uses the promise of marriage.

So we see that the myth undergoes a major transformation because the character of Don Juan no longer exerts an immediate seduction but must use means that are not of his own nature.

The English Don Juans of the seventeenth and eighteenth are characterized by their violence. We are witnessing the explosion of instincts. It is no longer just the erotic and sensual instincts but all forms of instincts. This explosion sets itself up in law,

In 1787, the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte appeared, featuring a Don Juan with a fierce appetite for life, bringing together the characteristics of the libertine aristocrats of the eighteenth century. It is situated in temporal immanence, living in the moment and rejecting all morality or religion. Mozart creates his opera Don Giovanni from Da Ponte's libretto and performed it for the first time in Vienna in 1788.

The musical Don Juan fully agrees with an epicurean Don Juan who enjoys every moment lived. The music conveys a sovereign and seductive sensuality through its intrinsic strength. The appearance of the commander at the end of the opera is preserved.

The Nineteenth-Century Don Juan: "A Romantic Hero Seducing As Much As He Is Seduced"

The nineteenth-century Don Juan is the heir to Mozart's Don Giovanni. The music seems to have caused him to lose the cynicism and perversion of the Moliéresque hero. The Don Juan therefore presents himself as a seductive romantic hero as much as he is seduced. He is romantic because he attracts love without implementing the resources of a calculated seduction. He also carries within him an image of a feminine absolute whose search becomes a disproportionate and melancholy quest.

If he leaves the women he meets and loves, it is therefore not because of the satisfaction of purely sensual desires but either because of fate, or because the ideal of the woman he loves, whom he imagines as unique, does not can never correspond to reality. As Gendarme de Bévotte remarks, Hoffmann seems to offer the first figure of a romantic Don Juan in his Fantasiesstücke in Callot's handle published in 1814.

The title became "Don Juan, eine fabelhafte Begebenheit, die sich mit einem reisenden Enthusiasten zugetragen’ (Don Juan, fabulous adventure arrived at an Enthusiast). This Don Juan restores the link with the absolute and beauty, he becomes “the symbol of man's aspiration towards supreme beauty. »

Don Juan replaces the divine absolute with the feminine absolute and opposes with all his might the prosaic and relativistic love imposed by bourgeois society. Don Juan is now the embodiment of the rebellion of the solitary individual in the face of any coercive force, whether social or religious. He takes on the romantic aspirations that agitate the century and partly loses his ability to really enjoy his conquests.

Versions of this romantic Don Juan multiplied in nineteenth-century Europe. the Don Juan by Byron is a particular example to which we will return. Pushkin writes The stone guest in 1830 in which Don Juan attains superhuman and almost divine greatness. Musset offered in 1832, in Namuna, a conception of a Don Juan as thirsty for a beauty that only woman can offer him.

He is a poetic Don Juan, removed from all sordid cynicism, who absolutizes love and devotes his existence to it. Redemption becomes possible again, as shown by the works of Mérimée and Dumas, the Souls of Purgatory, in 1834, and Don Juan de Maraña or the fall of an angel, in 1836. These two works reconcile two legends, that of Don Juan and that of Don Miguel Mañara, who lived in Seville in the seventeenth century, had a debauched youth but was later of great piety.

The Don Juan sketched out in the nineteenth century is therefore an absolutely romantic hero. The authors who are attached to this subject decide to highlight this or that particular aspect of the myth, thus creating a character with many facets but which nevertheless remains Don Juan”.