Mozart wrote the music to "Don Giovanni" in the summer of 1787. Judging by the circumstance that there is no entry in his autograph catalogue between June 24 and August 10 in that year, it would seem that he had devoted the intervening seven weeks chiefly, if not wholly, to the work. When he went to Prague in September he carried the unfinished score with him, and worked on it there largely in the summer house of his friends, the Duscheks, who lived in the suburbs of the city. Under date of October 28 he entered the overture in his catalogue. As a matter of fact, it was not finished till the early morn of the next day, which was the day of the first production of the opera. Thereby hangs the familiar tale of how it was composed. On the evening of the day before the performance, pen had not been touched to the overture. Nevertheless, Mozart sat with a group of merry friends until a late hour of the night. Then he went to his hotel and prepared to work. On the table was a glass of punch, and his wife sat beside him--to keep him awake by telling him stories. In spite of all, sleep overcame him, and he was obliged to interrupt his work for several hours; yet at 7 o'clock in the morning the copyist was sent for and the overture was ready for him. The tardy work delayed the representation in the evening, and the orchestra had to play the overture at sight; but it was a capital band, and Mozart, who conducted, complimented it before starting into the introduction to the first air. The performance was completely successful, and floated buoyantly on a tide of enthusiasm which set in when Mozart entered the orchestra, and rose higher and higher as the music went on. On May 7, 1788, the opera was given in Vienna, where at first it made a fiasco, though Mozart had inserted new pieces and made other alterations to humor the singers and add to its attractiveness. London heard it first on April 12, 1817, at the King's Theatre, whose finances, which were almost in an exhausted state, it restored to a flourishing condition. In the company which Manuel Garcia brought to New York in 1825 were Carlo Angrisani, who was the Masetto of the first London representation, and Domenico Crivelli, son of the tenor Gaetano Crivelli, who had been the Don Ottavio. Garcia was a tenor with a voice sufficiently deep to enable him to sing the barytone part of Don Giovanni in Paris and at subsequent performances in London. It does not appear that he had contemplated a performance of the opera in New York, but here he met Da Ponte, who had been a resident of the city for twenty years and recently been appointed professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. Da Ponte, as may be imagined, lost no time in calling on Garcia and setting on foot a scheme for bringing forward "my 'Don Giovanni,'" as he always called it. Crivelli was a second-rate tenor, and could not be trusted with the part of Don Ottavio, and a Frenchman named Milon, whom I conclude to have been