Let her not listen then (like the silly girl we commonly see upon the stage, half-magnetized out of a weak sorrow into a weaker involuntary yielding to the ludicrous) to the exquisitely comic appeal of Leporello, when the vain-glorious fellow unrolls his tremendous list of his master’s conquests among the fair sex, enumerating the countries, ranks, styles of beauty, etc. The melody of this “Catalogue Song” is altogether surpassing. It is the perfection of _buffo_, as we have before had the perfection of serious recitative. After naming the numbers for Italy, Germany, etc., when it comes to the climax (Elvira’s own land): _Ma in Espagna mille e trè_, [But in Spain one thousand and three,] it is ludicrously grave; the orchestra meanwhile has chopped the measure into short units, alternate instruments just touching different points of height and depth, till they seem at last to count it all up on the fingers, first downward in the tripping _pizzicato_ scale of the violins, then upward in gruff confirmation in the basses. In the slow time, where it comes to the specification of the different qualities of beauty, the _grande maëstosa_, the _piccina_, etc., the melody is one of the most beautiful and pathetic that could be imagined. One wonders how Mozart could have expended such a wealth of melody upon so light a theme; it seems as lavish a disproportion of means to end, as when we read of travelers roasting their eggs in the cinders of Vesuvius. But such was the musical fullness and integrity of Mozart; the genial vein, once opened, _would_ run only pure gold; and his melodies and harmonies are not merely proportioned to the specialities of the subject, but are at every moment moulded in the style and spirit of the whole work. Besides, the comedy consists here in the contrast of a pathetic melody with a grotesque thought. Moreover the whole thing is truer in the fact, that not only Leporello’s, but Don Juan’s own melodies, as indeed the very nature of music, seem mournfully to rebuke the desperado. In the most comic and most bacchanalian strains, the music saddens with a certain vague presentiment of the fearful _dénouement_ of the drama.