Don Giovanni Trionfante

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the theme of Dom Juan was transformed into one bearing literary qualities (giving rise to an array of poems, plays and novels). It was like a ‘buzz word’, or the obsession of an élite. The author explores this literary explosion by following up three clues from the theatre: a) investigating the period which marked a turning point, through Mozart’s opera as well as through the convergence of his opera and Hoffmann’s tale (1813), as these were to have interesting consequences on the development of relations between Dom Juan and the theatre; b) examining the variants of the “second Don Juan” in order to highlight the tiny anomalies that are also present in the purely theatrical “first” version; c) and from these anomalous presences trying to infer what theatre craft at the beginnings of professional theatre, might have been.