and retires to a nunnery. Don Giovanni proceeds to sup merrily [concertino]; Pasquariello eats with him, and Lanterna wait upon them; they toast the town of Venice and its lovely women.[128] A knock is heard, and, to the horror of the two servants, the Commandant appears. Don Giovanni bids him welcome, and orders Pasquariello to serve him; he accepts the Commandant's invitation, giving him his hand on it, but rejects his exhortation to repentance, and is delivered over to the demons.[129]
A "Convitato di Pietra," by Tritto, is known to me only through Fétis, who places it in the year 1783.[130]
A wealth of material, which made the task of selection difficult, left Da Ponte no necessity to task his invention for his libretto.[131] We have no means of ascertaining how deep or how extensive were his previous studies,[132] but even compared with Gazzaniga's libretto, which he closely followed for the greater part of the first act and the second finale, we cannot fail to recognise his superiority in the arrangement of the plot, in the delineation of character, and in the grouping of situations for musical treatment, especially in the ensembles. His discrimination in the selection of material was also very just. He saw clearly that if the spectral apparition was to have its due effect it must be set in vivid contrast with the representation of actual life, with all its impulses of passion, of love, hate, or despair, of humour and merriment. He cannot be said to have cast the magic of true poetry over his work, nor has it the knightly tone of the Spanish original, but he has endowed
his characters with the easy pleasure-loving spirit of the time; and the sensual frivolity of life at Venice or Vienna is mirrored in every page of his "Don Giovanni." The language displays a versatility almost amounting to gracefulness; and, remembering to what a low level of vulgarity the treatment of the subject had been brought, we shall be the more ready to recognise the effort to raise the dialogue to a more sensible and refined standard. Da Ponte was right in placing the main points on which the action turns upon the stage, and in furnishing the composer with a number of musically effective situations, in which the elements of tragedy and comedy, of horror and merriment, meet and mingle together. This curious intermixture of ground-tones, which seldom allows; expression to any one pure and unalloyed mood, is the special characteristic of the opera. Mozart grasped the unity of these contrasts lying deep in human nature, and expressed them so harmoniously as to open a new province to his art, for the development of which its mightiest forces were henceforward to be concentrated. Great as has been the progress of music in the expression of this inner life of man since Mozart's time, he has not yet been surpassed in his power of creating living forms instinct with artistic beauty, and endowed with perfect dramatic truth. When Goethe declared that Mozart would have been the man to compose his "Faust,"[133] he was thinking of "Don Giovanni"; but it could scarcely have been the merely external manipulation of the plot, however skilful, which directed his opinion. With the instinctive certainty of genius he felt the universality of Mozart's conception and representation of humanity, and acknowledged him as his equal on what was, in his judgment, a far more extensive field than this.