The curtain rises. Scene, a garden in Spain. Time, just before daybreak. Leporello, cloaked, with a lantern, paces watchfully to and fro before a noble villa, and sings with heavy bass of his drudgeries and dangers in the service of his graceless master; kindling half seriously at the thought how fine a thing it would be to play the gallant and the gentleman himself. The light and exquisite accompaniment of the instruments meanwhile is like the softness of a summer night, and seems to count the moments of pleasure. The dreams of the valet are soon disturbed. Don Juan, his face hid by his mantle, rushes from the house, struggling from the grasp of Donna Anna, who, pale and disheveled, clings to him convulsively, and seeks to detain and to discover the bold, mysterious man, who has dared thus to invade her privacy and her honor. Her hurried and accusing melody, in these snatches of recitative, is full of a dignity and a pure and lofty fire that characterize alike her person and the whole music of her port. With drawn sword in one hand, and a torch in the other, her old father, the Commendatore (commander of a religious order) rushes out and challenges the bravo, who deals him a death-thrust. The startlingly vivid orchestral picture, which accompanies and as it were guides these sword thrusts, is followed by a slow, mournful trio of bass voices, in which are gloomily contrasted the scornful triumph of Don Juan, the dying wail and warning of the old man, and the comic terror of Leporello. Nothing could be more thrillingly impressive; that music could mean nothing else but death stalking suddenly into the very midst of life! Then comes the passionate outpouring of the daughter’s grief, and that inimitable scene of the most musical as well as most dramatic dialogue in the whole range of the lyric drama. It is the perfection of recitative. What exquisite tenderness and sincerity of sorrow in that violin figure which accompanies her inquiry for her father, (_padre mio_,) when she first recovers from her swoon! How sweet and comforting that fall of the seventh, where Ottavio tells her: _Hai sposo e padre in me_ (Thou hast husband and father in me!) And how fiery and grand the passage where she inspires the tame lover with that sublimely solemn oath of revenge, and the hot, scouring blast of their swift and wonderful duett which follows it. In all this there is no delicate touch of feeling, no spiritual token of great passion and great purpose, possible to voice or instruments, omitted; no note omissible or of slight significance. Here is an opening of most pregnant import. One scene of moderate length has impressed us, as by the power of fate, to the seeing through of the profoundest drama of life. Here we have witnessed, as it were, the first reaction of the eternal Law, the first hint of destiny in this splendid libertine’s thus far irresistible career. Already is this almost superhuman pleasure-hunt of genius past its climax, and the dread note