The character of Don Juan, thus conceived, this splendid embodiment of the free, perfect, unmisgiving luxury of sense and passion, would be no character at all, but only an absurdity, an impossibility in the spoken drama. There is no prose about it; nothing literal and sober; take away the exaltation, the rhythmical nature of it, and it falls entirely to the ground. Only Music could conceive and treat it; Music, which is the language of the ideal, innermost, _potential_ life, and not of the actual life. But music equally does justice to both sides of the fact. In this triumphant career of passion, inasmuch as it is among men and laws and sympathies and social customs, a fearful retribution is foreshadowed. But not in _him_, not in this Titan of the senses, this projected imagination of unlimited enjoyment and communion. It is through the music that the shuddering presentiment continually creeps. Through music, which in acknowledging the error, in laying bare the fatal discord, at the same time symbolizes its resolution. Through music, in whose vocabulary sin and suffering and punishment are never final; in whose vivid coloring the great doom itself is but a vista into endless depths of harmony and peace and unexclusive bliss beyond. The splendid sinner’s end is rather melodramatic in the opera; and yet there is a poetic and a moral truth in it; and the spectre of the _Commendatore_ is a creation fully up to Shakspeare. No man ever literally came to that; but many have come to dread it. Beings, as we are, so full of energies and of exhaustless passional promptings to all sorts of union and acquaintance with the rest of being; urged, just in proportion to the quantity of life in us, to seek most intimate relationship all round, materially and spiritually, we dread the mad excess of our own pent up forces. Surrounded by set formulas; denied free channels corresponding to our innate tendencies and callings; plagued by traditions, and chafed by some social discipline, in which the soul sees nothing it can understand, except it be the holy principle of Order in the abstract, do we not often start to see what radicalism lurks in every genuine spring of life or passion, in everything spontaneous and lovable? Who, more than the pleasure-loving, sympathy-seeking, generous, child-like, glorious, imaginative, sensitive, ecstatic, sad Mozart, would be apt to shudder in dreams, in the night solitudes of his over-worked, and feverish and wakeful brain, before the colossal shadow of what possibly _he_ might become through excess of the very qualities that made him diviner than common mortals? This allegory can certainly be traced through “Don Giovanni.” The old governor or commander, whom he kills, personates the Law. The cold, relentless marble statue, that stalks with thundering foot-fall into the middle of his solitary orgies alter him, is the stern embodiment of custom and convention, which he defies to the end, and boldly grasps the