Act II. opens with one of those half humorous, half serious

conversations between the Don and Leporello, which ever and anon relieve the story. The servant, stung by the ungrateful and outrageous conduct of his master in the ball-room explosion, announces his determination to quit him; but they are too essential to each other, and the Don soon coaxes, laughs, and bribes him out of that notion. This duett is in real Italian _parlando_ style, a syllable to every note, quick and brief as it is comically expressive; for this enemy of woman’s peace has new business on hand; the unlucky night is not too far gone to try one more adventure. So here follows the summer warmth and beauty of the serenade scene under Donna Elvira’s window, who sits above there, pouring out her nightingale complainings under the stars, in a melody of ravishing sweetness and tenderness, forming the upper part of a _Terzetto_, in which the _sotto voce_ dialogue of the Don and his man below grotesquely blends. He changes garments with Leporello, and lending his own voice, while Leporello gesticulates, in strains of feigned repentance and returning love, entices the too easily persuaded lady down into the arms of his counterfeit, while he takes up his guitar to serenade, not Elvira, but Elvira’s maid, now that the field is clear, in that most graceful little serenading air, which seems so easy and so off-hand, with its light _arpeggio_ accompaniment by violins alone: _Deh vieni alla finestra_. But the fortunate stars of our all-seducing hero seem this night to have forsaken him; again his business is balked. Mirth and melody, fun and sentiment are strangely mingled in this scene, and, indeed, in this whole act. The serenade gets finished; the tree, as it were, is climbed; but before the fruit can be gathered, the game is interrupted by Masetto and the peasants armed, hot from the ball-room scene, in search of the splendid scoundrel. Masetto gets the worst of it; and here we have one of the world’s three or four very choicest and purest gems of melody, Zerlina’s exquisitely tender and comforting song to her poor, bruised, and beaten bridegroom, _Vedrai carino_; so beautifully simple, in the homely key of C natural; so innocently voluptuous; so full of blissful love; so like the balsam (_un certo balsamo_) of which she hints with fond and arch significance! And as she makes him place his hand upon her heart at the words, _sentilo battere_, (feel it beat,) you seem to hear its glad and honest beating in the music. We cannot forbear inserting here the following interpretation of this song, which we have read since our analysis of the opera was made. It is from the pen of an intelligent Russian gentleman, who has written in French and German an admirable Life of Mozart, with a critical examination of his works. We translate from the German copy:

“_Vedrai Carino_ is, like so many pieces of our opera, super-dramatic music. When we hear it, we forget the text, we forget the person. There is no longer any Zerlina or Masetto. Something infinite, absolute, and verily divine announces itself to the soul. Is it perhaps nothing but love, represented under one of the countless modifications by which it is distinguished in each individual, according to the laws of his nature, and the peculiar vicissitudes of his fortune? No; the soul feels rather a direct effluence of the principle itself, from which all youth, all love, all joy, and every vital reproduction flows. The genius of the Spring’s metamorphoses, he namely, whom the old theosophists called Eros, who disembroiled chaos, who fructified germs and married hearts; this genius speaks to us in this music, as he has so often spoken in the murmurings of the brook that has escaped its icy prison, in the rustling of the young leaves, in the melodious songs of the nightingale, in the balmy odors which pervade the eloquent and inspiring stillness of a May night. Mozart had listened to and firmly held this ground-accord of this universal harmony; he arranged it for a soprano voice with orchestral accompaniment, and made of it the nuptial air of a young bride. Zerlina sings, surrounded by the shadows of the marriage night, while just about to cross the threshold, at which virginity pauses with prayer and trembling, expecting the confirmation of the holy title of wife. In this place the Aria becomes a genuine _scena_ of love, the source of life and of eternal rejuvenescence for all nature—of love, the spring-time of souls, and the most unstinted revelation of the all-goodness of the Creator. It is a marriage-song for all that loves, conceived in the same spirit with the ‘Ode to Joy’ by Schiller, allowing for the difference of tone and style between a Dithyrambic and an Eclogue. The theme, the image of the purest bliss, betrays none the less that inexplicable and seldom justified exaltation, which, in the fairest poetic hours of our existence, leads us to that unknown good whereof all other goods of earth are only shadows and foretastes. A rhythm without marked accent; a harmony without dissonances; a modulation which rests in the Tonic, and forgets itself, as if held fast there by a magic spell; a melody which cannot separate itself from its ineffaceable _motiv_; this tranquil rapture, this soft ecstasy, fill out the first half of the air. After the pause, hosts of nightingales begin to sing in chorus in the orchestra, while the voice, with exquisite monotony, murmurs, _Sentilo battere, toccami quà_. Then the same words are again uttered with the expression of passion; the heart of the young woman beats stronger and stronger; the sighs of the orchestra are redoubled, and the last vocal phrase, which bears the impress of chaste devotion, shows us the wife as she sinks softly upon the bosom of her husband. Mozart seems to have anticipated the desire of the ear, in that he lets the orchestra repeat the whole _motiv_ and the enchanting final phrases once again. He knew that the piece would be found too short, as it actually is the case.”

Good-night, then, to this happy couple, whom we leave, to trace the sequel of the comic vein just opened in that ‘Sartor’-ian exchange of personality between the master and the servant; but also at the same to receive still more distinct and solemn intimations (all the more significant for this very contrast of the comic) of the supernatural reaction that is preparing soon to burst upon the head of the magnificent libertine and outlaw. The Sextette which now follows is altogether unique and unrivaled among concerted pieces in opera. The music of this Sextette covers such an ever-shifting variety of action, and so much of a _scene_, that one may hear it once without thinking of its wealth and admirable structure as music. Yet for every point in all this action, and for all shades of relation between the persons, as well as for each separate personality, there is a correspondence in the music. The scene has changed to a _bujo loco_, or dark place, (the libretto says, a porch to Donna Anna’s palace.) First appear the counterfeit Giovanni and Elvira, who is too happy to walk with him to the end of the world, if need be; while he, (Leporello,) tired of imitating his master’s voice, is groping about to find an exit. In an Andante melody, in the same key, and of a kindred character with that by which we first knew her (_Ah! chi mi dice mai_,) she utters her fear of being left alone in this bujo loco. Just as her companion finds the door, the groping, cautious music brightens into the bold key and trumpet-style which always heralds Anna and Ottavio, who enter amid blaze of torches. Sweet is the consoling appeal of the _tenore_ to his grief-stricken Anna, whose response, less fiery and commanding, but not less sublimely spiritual than her last great solo, even hints of death as the only solution of life’s riddle for her. Meanwhile the first two, who have lurked unnoticed, are just making good their exit, when Zerlina and Masetto appear, who thinks that now he has the _briccone_ at his mercy; the bluster of Masetto, the surprise of Anna and Ottavio at the sight of the supposed Giovanni, the grotesque, crouching plea of the valet, the intercession of still deceived Elvira for “her husband,” then their recognition of _her_, then a new brandishing of Masetto’s club, and then the ass throwing off the lion’s skin, and begging mercy, all are made thrice expressive by the music, which varies instinctively each moment, and yet ceases not to weave the unitary complex whole. At last all the six voices join in a swift and wind-like Allegro, in which Anna’s voice takes the highest and most florid part, Zerlina’s the second, Elvira’s the third, and so on, and in which there is now and then a wild Æolian-harp-like passage of harmony, which seems the fore-feeling of the higher powers which henceforth are to take part in the drama.

But first we have the masterpiece and model of all tenor solos. In it Ottavio commends his _Il mio tesoro_ to the care of these friends, and in it he proves himself the truest, tenderest, most devoted and most religious of lovers, if Heaven _has_ reserved it to a stronger force than his to crush the mighty sinner against whom he has taken such an oath of vengeance. But the opera could not rob itself of the statue, and its last scene, and its whole sublimity, to make him a hero, when it was enough that he should know how to _love_ a Donna Anna.

Passing over a duett between Leporello and Zerlina, rarely sung, in fact an after-thought of the composer, which he is said to have added to conciliate the lower taste of a Viennese manager or audience; and passing over (for we must be brief) a truly transcendent solo for Elvira: _Mi tradi quell’ alma ingrata_, in whose fluid, ever-modulating melody her musing, sad soul seems dissolved in reverie, we come to the marvelous church-yard scene. Here glimmers the white equestrian statue of the murdered commander in the back-ground; and here the Don and Leporello seek a rendezvous after their new discomfiture, to re-exchange hats and mantles, and so forth. Their loud levity is suddenly hushed by a voice of warning from the statue, accompanied in strange chords by the unearthly tones of the trombones (which instruments, instead of being lavished in Verdi fashion, upon all the strong passages, have been entirely kept back till now for this supernatural “beginning of the end,”) mingled with the low reed tones. _Di rider finirai_, etc. (“Thou shalt cease to laugh before dawn!”) A short old choral strain, in which the voice ends, spectral-like, upon the Dominant of the key (A minor), struck with the major Third. This is a church cadence; it belongs to eternity, which knows no Minor, no such type of “earthly un-rest.” It freezes to the heart of Don Giovanni, who starts dismayed, but only for a moment; and soon the marble lips break silence once more to rebuke his mockery. So far it has been introductory recitative; but now the orchestra is all life and melody again, for the luscious music of the duett in which Giovanni compels the trembling servant at the sword’s point to salute the statue and invite him to sup with him. There is no more exquisite fairy-work in the whole opera than the instrumentation of this scene. It were hard to tell whether the impression left by it partakes most of the comic, of the supernaturally terrible, or of the beautiful. All these elements are grotesquely blended in it, yet without seeming incongruity. The beauty of the music harmonizes and idealizes the action; it lends its singular fascination to the marvelous; it makes the terror doubly real, by expressing the vague charm which every terror has after all to the soul, glad (even in its terror) of the excitement of something altogether strange and infinite. Mozart knew better than to freeze the blood up here entirely, with unearthly tones of horror, except during those brief utterances of the marble rider; that he reserved for the end, of which this is but the beginning. He has lavished all the luxury of melodic invention upon the instrumentation of this duett; the music in the main still gushes warm and genial and human, and hence you feel the supernatural all the more inwardly and powerfully, when shudders of strange awe cross occasionally its placid, sparkling flow. _O statua gentillissima_—cheerily and bravely the beautiful strain sets out, in the rich key of E major; but as the knave shrinks back in terror, crying _padron! mirate!_ etc., the deprecating expression of his voice dropping through the interval of a Seventh, with the instruments accompanying in unison, is alike droll and marvelous. Still the cheerful melody goes on, in spite of ghosts, until the statue nods acceptance, when the unearthly modulation and _tremolo_ of the music, falling with sudden emphasis upon Leporello’s _Ah! — —h! che scena!_ (Ah! what a sight!), gives the whole scene for the time the superstitious coloring of his soul. But when he comes to tell his master how the spectre nodded, and when his master repeats the strain and gesture with him, the fear has become subordinate to the charm of adventure, and the music takes the gay and reckless tone of Giovanni. Life shall be all a feast, is _his_ creed, ghosts and miracles to the contrary; and festally the bright strain dies away, softer and softer, as they depart, to the tune of _Andiamo via di qua_ (let us quit this place), to which the servant’s voice chimes in as second very heartily.

Here the curtain usually falls, closing a second Act, although the composer covers the homeward flight of the pair, fatigued and hungry with that night’s adventures and discomfitures, and the preparation of the supper, by a beautiful and elaborate recitative and aria of Donna Anna, addressed to her devoted Ottavio, whose urgent plea for the consummation of their union she tenderly puts off, as with a presentiment that her love is to know no earthly consummation, and that her life is already too much of the other world. This song: _Non mi dir_, bloomed one of the heavenliest and purest in the wreath of Jenny Lind.

Act Third is the grand Finale, with its tremendous music, its apparition, its supernatural vindication of the Law, and the splendid sinner’s doom. Remember, day has not dawned yet since that other Finale, to the First Act; their supper that time was stormily broken off, and they have had little rest in the mean time. But they have got home at last, and _Gia la mensa è preparata_: now the supper is prepared; a smart and animated strain of full orchestra in the bold key of D. The Don has shut himself in by himself with all the harmonies of sense and appetite; it is the pure feast of egoism; there are no guests, but his own appetites and riotous imaginations, for whom all things are provided; and little thinks he of the guest whom he _has_ invited! Droll Leporello, now all appetite, is in attendance, devouring furtive morsels of the rich dishes, and uncorking the champagne, (a situation commonly too tempting to our buffo, who makes the fun excessively and disgustingly broad,) and making broad allusions to the _barbaro appetito_ of his master. There is a band of wind instruments, too, from whom all the while proceed the most enlivening appeals to composite enjoyment, in a succession of rare morsels of melody from well-known operas of the time, for which both master and man show an appreciating ear. The last of these is the famous _Non piu andrai_, from Mozart’s own “Nozze di Figaro,” to which Leporello may well exclaim: “That I know too well.” Through all this the Titian-like, voluptuous quality of Mozart comes out afresh. It is the music of pure, unalloyed sensuous enjoyment; not a shadow of aught serious or sentimental comes over its harmony, until once more his better nature makes one final appeal, entreating him to repentance, in the person of poor, constant Donna Elvira, who suddenly rushes in and kneels at his feet. But the Don laughs at her simple lecture, and preaches up to her his bacchanalian gospel.

Here mark a fine point in the action, a fine touch of poetic truth, worthy of Mozart’s genius. It is _she_, his better nature, as we have said, his own rejected truer self, who loves him better than he loves himself; it is she, Elvira, who, as she leaves the stage, is the first to meet the fearful apparition and by her shriek give warning. That shriek, thrown into the music, has suddenly changed its smooth, sparkling surface into fierce boiling eddies, and stirred up the whole sea of harmony from its profoundest depths. The musicians on the stage have vanished. No time now for their toy melodies! Every chord now cleaves the dark veil of the supernatural, like lightnings in the blackest night; the syncopated rhythm tells of vague and wonderful forebodings. _Che grido è questo?_ (What noise is this?) And Leporello is sent out to see. Wilder and heavier grows the music, as he returns white and speechless, and only able in his half-wittedness of terror to imitate with his feet the heavy _ta, ta_, the approaching foot-fall of the man of marble, who has descended from his charger in the grave-yard. It requires the master’s hardihood to open the door for him, and amid those solemn and terrific crashes of the orchestra, with which the overture commenced, the strange guest stalks into the middle of the scene.

With hard, ponderous, marble tones, like blows, falling whole octaves, the statue announces himself as good as his word in accepting Giovanni’s invitation. The amazed unbeliever, trembling and yet summoning up his whole pride of will, which never yet forsook him, would fain prove as good as _his_ word, too, and orders Leporello, who has crawled away under the table, to get ready another supper. But “not on mortal food feeds” this guest from the other world; “graver concerns” have led him here; and the instruments are again traversing those _unsettled_ scales, whose wonderful effect we noticed in the overture. _Parla, parla_: rings out the rich, fresh baritone of the dauntless Amphytrion, as much as to say: “talk on, old fellow! I listen; you are a ghost, but I am a substance; I believe in myself, say what you will.” All very brave! but listen to the orchestra (as you cannot _help_ listening) if you would know how nevertheless it goes with him in the inner workings of his soul, in those mysterious depths of consciousness which hitherto he has so wilfully refrained from sounding. That heavy, muffled tread of the sub-bass in triplets, making the ground quake, means more than the “tertian ague” of poor Leporello there, with head thrust out cautiously from under the table, and voice, automaton-like, moving in unison with the _basso profondo_ of the orchestra. A pause is filled with a monotonous beat of the basses, when the crashing diminished-seventh chords begin anew, and louder than before, while the spectre again opens its marble jaws to tender the Don an invitation in its turn, which he, stout-hearted to the last, in spite of Leporello’s trembling, grotesque warnings, accepts. The statue asks his hand in pledge; he boldly gives it, starts as if an infinite pang and sense of death shot from the cold, stony hand through all the marrow of his bones; with an infinite audacity of will he refuses to repent; the spectre sinks through the ground; he is a doomed one; the flames of hell burst in on every side, with visions of the damned; a chorus of spectres: _vieni!_ (come!) is heard amid the infernal whirl and tempest of the music; he wrestles with the demons and drops dead, the whole phantasmagoria vanishing, just as the other characters of the piece come in search of the reprobate, who listen to Leporello’a chattering story, dispose of their several destinies after the approved fashion of dramatic conclusions, and wind up with chanting a solemn canon over the _Dissoluto punito_, to the words: “Such is the end of the evil-doer!”

It is usual, however, to terminate the performance with the fall of Giovanni. The parts which follow, although admirable as music, are plainly superfluous to the action, as a poetic and artistic whole, and must have been added by Mozart out of mere conformity to old dramatic usage, which assembles and disposes of all the surviving characters of a piece in the last scene.

There is great room for melodramatic nonsense and _diablerie_ in this judgement scene, in which the theatres have used full license. But if the orchestra be complete and efficient, there is no possibility of travestying or perverting the sublime and terrible intention of the music, which from the moment that the statue enters is enough to freeze one’s blood, and preoccupies all avenues of sense or consciousness with supernatural and infinite suggestions. And yet does Music’s sweet and faithful prophecy of reconciliation, like the “still, small voice” out of the inmost heart of things, still reach us somehow through it all!

* * * * *

The reader, who has followed us through this review of “Don Giovanni,” clinging always to the musical thread of interpretation, will find himself as little able as ourselves to sympathize with the regret, so frequently expressed, that Mozart should have prostituted his genius in this composition, by the false marriage of so much divine music with an unworthy subject. We believe the marriage was a true one. He did not merely cater to a low, licentious taste, in the selection of this story. Never was a choice made more heartily. Or, if he did not himself _choose_ the plot, yet he _fell in_ most heartily, and as it were, by a providential correspondence with the invention of Da Ponte—as heartily as he afterward fell in with the terrific images of the old Latin hymn, when he composed his own “Requiem,” in writing a Requiem to order for another. In these two works the life and genius of Mozart found their highest expression. “Don Juan” and the “Requiem,” in all their contrast, are alike true to the very texture and temper of the man. “Don Juan,” written in the hey-day of his genial faculties, in his hour and scene of greatest outward success, in the city of Prague, where he was understood and loved as nowhere else, surrounded by devoted friends, and with an orchestra and troup of singers worthy to be his interpreters, represents his sunny side, his keen sensibility to all refined delights of sense and soul, and his great faith in joy, in ecstasy, in all material and sensual harmonies. The “Requiem” bears to “Don Juan,” as a whole, the same relation that the last scene of that opera bears to the preceding parts; it expresses the religious awe and mystery of his soul, his singular presentiment of death, his constant feeling of the Infinite. The opera, in its last scene, rises to a sphere of music kindred with the “Requiem;” there vibrated the same deep chords of his nature. It was the very subject of all others for him to pour the whole warm life-tide of his soul and music into, and thus lift up and animate a poor old literal fiction, that somehow strangely kept its hold upon the popular mind, with all its weight of grotesqueness, extravagance, vulgarity and tom-foolery, into a vivid drama of the whole impetuous, bewildered, punished, yet far-hoping and indomitable experiment of human life.

Here are the two elements which seem in contradiction. Here, on the one side, is this bold, generous passion-life, with its innate gospel of joy, and transport, and glorious liberty; how well could Mozart understand it, and how eloquently preach it in that safe, universal dialect of Music, which utters only the heart-truth, and not the vulgar perversion of any sentiment! Here, on the other hand, is the stern Morality of being, frowning in conflict with the blind indulgence of the first. The first is false by its excess, by losing Order out of sight; while Order, sacred principle, in its common administration between men, in its turn is false, through its blind method of suppression and restraint, blaspheming and ignoring the divine springs of passion, which it should accept and regulate. The music is the heavenly and prophetic mediator that resolves the strife.

Hence the music of “Don Giovanni” presents two sides, two parts in strongest contrast. Love, joy, excitement, freedom, the complete life of the senses, are the theme of the first part, represented in the keen and restless alternation of the Don’s intrigues and pleasures—a downright, unmistrusting, beautiful assertion of the natural man—and you have it all summed up to one text and climax, in the first Finale, in the brief champagne sparkle and stormy transport of the little chorus, _Viva la_ Liberta! As the burden of that part is Liberty, so the burden of the last part, the counter-text and focus, is Order, the violated Law; and as the central figure here stalks in the supernatural statue, stony and implacable. It is the whole story of life, the one ever-repeated, although ever-varied drama of dramas; and it is set forth here, both sides of it, most earnestly in this sincere and hearty music, which in its own exhaustless beauty hints the reconciliation of the two principles, and to the last is true to the divine good of the senses and the passions, and to the presentiment of a pure and perfect state, when these shall be, not dreaded, not suppressed, but regulated, harmonized, made rhythmical and safe, and more than ever lifesome, and spontaneous by Law as broad and deep and divine us themselves.

Do we defy the moral of the matter, when we feel a certain thrill of admiration as Don Juan boldly takes the statue’s hand, still strong in his life-creed, however he may have missed the heavenly method in its carrying out, and somehow inspired with the conviction that this judicial consummation is not, after all, the end of it; but that the soul’s capacity for joy and harmony is of that god-like and _asbestos_ quality that no hells can consume it?

[5] It is a curious fact that the first opera of which we read, and which was produced at Rome in the year 1600, bore the title of: _Rappresentazione del Animo e del Corpo_.

[6] “Don Giovanni” was composed in 1787. The Abbé Da Ponte, who wrote the book, and who enjoyed at Vienna the same distinction with Metastasio as a writer of musical poetry, died in New York, in December 1838, at the age of 90 years, in a state of extreme destitution. For thirty years he had sought a living in that city by teaching the Italian language.

* * * * *

AUTUMN RAIN.

BY MRS. E. C. KINNEY.

How I love the Autumn rain! Pattering at my window-pane, With a liquid, lulling tone, As I sit all day alone— Thinking o’er and o’er again Only how I love the rain!

How I love the Autumn rain! When it brings a thoughtful train— When in meditative mood I enjoy my solitude, While the full and active brain Works as busy as the rain.

How I love the Autumn rain When, without a care or pain, I can dream, and dream all day, Or with loitering Fancy stray— Weaving some capacious strain Musical as Autumn rain.

How I love the Autumn rain! When gray twilight comes again: When the flickering hearth-flumes dance, While the shadows dart askance— Seeming goblins to the brain, In the dreamy Autumn rain.

How I love the Autumn rain! Pattering at my window-pane, When upon my bed reposing— Half in waking, half in dozing, Then a dulcet music-strain Seems the pleasant Autumn rain.

How I love the Autumn rain! Though it come, and come again, Never does it weary me With its dull monotony; Never on my ear in vain Falls the pattering Autumn rain.

* * * * *

TO MARY ON EARTH.

BY A. J. REQUIER.

I’m thinking of thee, Mary, And twilight shadows fall With mournful stillness o’er the scene And deepen on the wall; But with the dim, departing light, Breaks faintly, from afar, Upon the bosom of the night, A solitary star!

I’m thinking of thee, Mary, For like that twilight scene, The dusk and dew were on my heart, To darken what was green; The dusk and dew were falling fast Upon its faded dreams, When, through the gloom, thy young love cast The fervor of its beams.

I’m thinking of thee, Mary, For in this lonely hour A thought of other times will come, Of parted friends will lower; And early images arise, With freshness flushed in pain, Of tender forms and tearful eyes I may not see again.

I’m thinking of thee, Mary, For when such moments dwell Upon my spirits with the weight Of a departing knell, A thought of thee breaks through the night Of memories that mar, With the lone glory of that bright, That solitary star!

Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary dear! If in my bosom shine One hope, one dream, one single wish, That single wish is thine; And if to see and feel and hear But thee, in heart and brain, Be love, I love thee, Mary dear, And cannot love again!

* * * * *

TO ADHEMAR.

BY E. ANNA LEWIS.

’Tis just one year ago, beloved, to-day, Since, my pale hand between thy hands compressed, I laid my burning brow upon thy breast, And bade the flood-gate of my heart give way— Then shut it down upon its streams for aye. We sought to speak, yet neither said farewell; Fate rung her larum through my spirit’s cell Until the chill of death upon me lay. I never could relive that hour again: Through every artery shot an icy pang, As if an adder pierced me with its fang, And dashed the roseate fount of life with bane. My eyes were open, yet I could not see— I breathed, yet I was dead. All things were dead to me.

* * * * *

ANNA TEMPLE.

A TALE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

BY JANE GAY.