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9 On Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasie Unpublished M. R. Beginning with Tirso de Molina, many of the greats of poetry and music have engaged with the titanic revolt of Don Juan against moral law.1 To name but a few from the ranks of the poets: Corneille, Molière, Byron (who created a highly un-Byronic Don Juan, depicting him as merely the plaything of an inordinately merciful destiny), E. T. A. Hoffmann, Grabbe, and Lenau, all of whom captured the hot-blooded and heroic Spaniard with all the power of their smoldering imagination.2 Mozart, Liszt,Richard Strauss,and many others have crafted Don Juan musically. Mozart, with the unconscious recognition of genius, not only depicted the seducer, who scorches women’s hearts with his gaze, but was also the ¤rst to have a feeling for the hero in Don Juan, who defends his claimed rights with a dagger in his ¤st. In the minore of the champagne song, Don Juan goes for his sword. In his Don Juan Fantasie, Liszt raises this proud act of daring to a peak and thereby equals Grabbe, if not surpasses him. Don Juan’s triumphant af¤rmation of life, in contrast to the revolt of hell and heaven that threatens him, swells up into an heroic, violent expressiveness in and after the triple crescendo of the champagne song; the musical force causes two worlds of distanced, opposing principles, like Christian and heathen morals, to collide suddenly—all this bears irrevocable witness to Liszt’s ¤ery imagination and creative power. Our friend Ferruccio Busoni, untimely departed, draws his own conclusions in his analysis of his own edition of the Don Juan Fantasie. It stresses that Da Ponte “has depicted Don Juan as not victorious enough,” that the knight’s gallant successes in the piece “are not brilliant,” and that, furthermore, he became “more suave than demonic.” However, here Busoni seems to forget that the rather outrageous censorship of ancient Austria would have dealt Da Ponte a painful rap on his writing ¤ngers had he dared to portray the victories of this dissoluto punito on the stage. Da Ponte had no other option than to let Leporello make an epic pronouncement of the “Don’s”fame. But do we not also encounter what Busoni reproves as Da Ponte’s “®aw” in the works of much greater poets, against whom Busoni takes care not to level such critical expositions? As Don Juan is the titan of sensuality, so Faust is the titan of the questing spirit, thirsty for knowledge, a much more elevated type! But must we not accept in good faith, especially in the ¤rst part of Goethe’s drama, the lonely height of Faust’s spirit without being able to follow its motivation in the dramatic events? Does Faust, who after all has over time made the almost omniscient Mephistopheles his own through a bloody pact, ask about the remaining mysteries of reason, as would seem to be¤t a gloomy romancer of truth? No, he lets himself drift in the current of life and is stranded for the rest of the play on the isle of blissful love. Does Wallenstein, in Schiller’s drama, show musical genius? But if we were to surrender all of Da Ponte, where would Mozart be, who depicts Don Juan in a battle with death and hell, while Busoni prefers to ¤nd, in the story and music of the champagne song, worldly mobility, “insouciance , bubbling zest for life,” and even a characteristic “non-sens(e)uality”?3 This conception seems to be in sharp contrast to Liszt’s, who elevates the Don Juan of his Fantasie to a symbol of nature’s power in battle with dominant morality . Whoever breathes in the heady, ¤ery air of Mozart’s or Liszt’s enthusiasm will see Don Juan as being as inseparable from his unbridled af¤rmation of life and audacious glori¤cation of death as, say, Napoleon is from his battle roar. On Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasie 55 ...

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