SOURCE: “El Burlador, Don Giovanni, and the Popular Concept of Don Juan,” in Hispania, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, May, 1955, pp. 173-77.

In the following essay, Sedwick concludes that neither de Molina's El burlador nor Mozart's Don Giovanni ultimately define the concept of Don Juan.

Tirso de Molina's Burlador de Sevilla is, among other things, a drama of the collective erotic subconscious, a Renaissance glorification of manly beauty and individual courage, and a baroque theological tragedy. [A paper read at the 36th Annual Meeting of the AATSP, New York, December 29-30, 1954.] Mozart's Don Giovanni portrays a burlador burlado, amateurishly gross in the art of love, and sketchily depicted by the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Mozart's music notwithstanding, Da Ponte lacked the tools for giving sufficient substance to an opera potentially the culmination of a great human and literary theme. Then, too, Tirso's great figure would necessarily lose its magic force...