Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 88

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Popular Culture Review

don Juan served as a warning to potential playboys, now asserting that he set the
standard for the social rebel. Mozart’s and DaPonte’s aims are equally ambiguous.
Psychologists and literary critics have suggested that the composer and his fictional
character had much in common. One could agree with Plaut by deciding that Don
Giovanni plays out Mozart’s own Oedipal tensions with his father.® As suggested
by Steptoe, an equally viable interpretation is that Mozart used the opera to reflect
a crisis reminiscent of Golden Age Spain, namely eighteenth-century Vienna’s
loss of previously clear cut distinctions between reality and appearance.^^ Or, one
could shift the question of intentionality to the librettist. Plaut submits that DaPonte’s
friendship with Casanova certainly gave the writer a role model for the opera.'®
Sellars’s intentions are equally inscrutable, as evidenced by Mac Donald’s criticism:
“It is impossible to determine whether he [Sellars] intends to unmask the eighteenth
century ideal of nobility, or to decry how far our world has fallen from it” (710).
Even those not interested in the author’s intent may find these interpretive
possibilities inviting. Sellars may have intended one or the other, or both, or neither,
or part of one but not the other, or something completely different. Not knowing
what Tirso, Mozart, or Sellars really meant to say, frees the reader to hear a dialog
that incorporates past, present, and future don Juans. In this exchange, all of don
Juan’s creators become anachronistic critics. Tirso and Mozart comment on the
twentieth-first century. On the other hand, Sellars speaks about the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. All three will have a voice in future don Juan texts.
In 1962, Henry Anatole Grunwald announced the death of don Juan. After
more than 300 years of scandalous seductions, the Western world’s most notorious
bad boy was defeated not by moral rectitude but ethical indifference. Grunwald
summarizes the principal reasons for don Juan’s demise as: “the decline of
aristocracy, the new status of women, the weakening both of convention and of
religion..., the fading of the supernatural, and the cult of psychology, which makes
excess no longer a sin but merely a disease...” (65). Indeed, the sexual revolution
and the women’s movement have left don Juan with scant opportunity to seduce
innocent women and fend off protective father figures. Furthermore, the ethics of
the “me” generation and the age of entitlement have robbed don Juan of the chance
to appall the spectator when he puts personal gratification before collective good
and religious belief. After all, in order for don Juan to be