We know what the cheerful phase of the life of the past century was. It has found a more fiery expression in _Don Giovanni_ than even in the _Figaro_. The Renaissance had introduced anew the free enjoyment of life of the ancient world. Think only what the Borgias were! From Italy and Spain it had made its way to France, when people there, for the first time, became conscious that they were “dancing on a volcano.” The feeling that there hangs a necessary and tragic sentence over the mere sensuousness of life, which is, after all, but a powerful picture of the transitoriness of all things earthly--a transitoriness which will always remain a dark enigma to the living themselves, and which therefore fills the proudest life with a certain melancholy--this feeling, which constitutes the poetic nucleus of the whole story of _Don Giovanni_, no one of all who have treated the subject, in an artistic manner, has fathomed or shown the power of, even in a remote degree, as did Mozart. The music, on the appearance of the stony guest, springs from the same fountain as Faust’s most beautiful and profound monologues. It is the consciousness, the heart-felt knowledge of the permanent duration of human life; and we have seen how life itself led Mozart, the artist and the man, to this heart-felt knowledge and to the feeling of something really eternal in the changes that surround us. The following further details as to the origin of _Don Giovanni_ are not devoid of interest. Da Ponte’s boasting in his memoirs is indeed exquisite, and shows that, after all, he had no idea what the value of the material of _Don Giovanni_ was. He had the three distinguished opera composers of Vienna at the time to write for, and he quieted the doubts of the emperor as to the success of such a task, by telling him that he would write during the night for Mozart and keep thinking of Dante’s Hell, in the morning for Martin, and read Petrarca, in the evening for Salieri, when Tasso should be his companion. With a bottle of tokai and some Spanish tobacco before him, and the sixteen-year-old daughter of his hostess, as his muse beside him, he says he began his work, and in two months the whole was finished.