Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 13

Dibdin and Moncrieff both borrowed heavily from M ozart’s
opera, while burlesquing it. Zorrilla, as I have already noted, was
often parodied as well. For instance, I offer Carlos Amiches y
Barrera and Enrique Garcfa Alvarez’s El trust de los Tenorios, a
“humorada cdmico-lfrica en un a cto . . . y en prosa,” with music by
Jose Serrano (1910).
An ocean away, what are we to make o f The Stoned Guest, a
twelve-inch stereo record, with a dust jacket noting the “entire
fiasco under the supervision o f Professor Peter Schickele,” “his
toric recording of the half-act opera by P. D. Q. Bach (1807-1742?),”
replete with such characters as Donna Ribalda (mezzanine so
prano), Carmen Ghia (off-coloratura), Don Octave (bargain counter
tenor), Dog (a large friendly Saint Bernard houndentenor), and II
Commendatoreador, the Stoned Guest (basso blotto), a role taken
by Schickele himself? Somewhere along the line, Don Giovanni
has been dropped from the lineup (the would-be abductor and rapist
turns out to be the heroine’s brother Octave, drunk and befuddled,
who, butter-fingered, drops her off the balcony). All this in no way
leaves Mozart off the hook, the “entire fiasco” being one in a long
succession of Don Giovanni satires, much like D ibdin’s and
M oncrieffs. Admirers of Schickele’s peculiar but undeniable
talents may still find a pressing of the record from the Vanguard
Recording Society (1970).
I could, space permitting, mention apassel o f motion pictures,
of the kind more properly called movies, not cinema, popular fare
dealing with Don Juan’s escapades. A majority o f them preserve
the comic note. One o f the very earliest, a 1909 one-reeler from
Germany titled Don Juan heiratet, produced and directed by the
great pioneer Otto Messter, has the hero accosted on his wedding
day by three of his former lovers, who kidnap him. He manages to
escape by pretending to hang him self.4 A nother film, a 1934
production starring Douglas Fairbanks, is wryly amusing. The
conceit would have it that once Juan has been falsely considered

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