Molière’s Dom Juan

02 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by michelinewalker in Comedy, Commedia dell'arte, Literature, Music

Tags

Brighella, commedia dell'arte, Dom Juan, Dramma giocoso, Faux-dévot, Molière, Noblesse oblige, Sganarelle

don-juan-illustration-1938-1_jpg!Blog
Don Juán, illustration by Carlos Saenz de Tejada, 1938
(Photo credit: WikiArt.org)

I’ve been writing a chapter on Molière‘s enigmatic Dom Juan (1665), the same Don Juán as Tirso de Molina‘s (24 March 1579 – 12 March 1648) Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra and Mozart‘s Don Giovanni (1587) composed on a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

A Dramma giocoso

Molière’s Dom Juan does not seem a comedy. It lacks a young couple trying to marry despite a heavy father’s objections. However, it borrows elements from the Italian commedia dell’arte. Molière’s Dom Juan has in fact been labelled a dramma giocoso, a playful or comic drama, blending tragic and comical elements, which violates the rules of 17^th-century French drama.

For instance, Sganarelle is a descendant of Brighella, a zanni in the Italian commedia dell’arte. He and Dom Juan are nearly always together, which makes for an incongruous relationship: Dom Juan is the master and Sganarelle, the valet. Molière’s play is a Saturnalia.

The Characters and other Elements

Our main characters are Dom Juan and his valet, Sganarelle (Mozart’s Leporello), played by Molière when the play premièred on 15 February 1665.

Dom Juan is Done Elvire’s husband. She has left a convent to marry him, but he no longer wishes to be her husband. He wants to be “free.” Done Elvire’s brothers, Dom Carlos and Dom Alonse, must avenge Done Elvire: (point d’honneur, point of honour), but fail to do so. When Dom Carlos speaks to Done Juan (V. iii), the latter has become a faux dévot, a man who feigns devotion to serve earthly needs. It appears Molière is meditating his Tartuffe (1664).

The play also features two peasant girls, Charlotte and Mathurine, whom Dom Juan tries to “seduce.” He’s told Charlotte that he will marry her, but her fiancé, Pierrot, puts up a fight. Dom Juan has also told Mathurine that he will marry her. However, there is no successful seduction in Molière’s play, not even a kiss, except on Charlotte’s hand, that she describes as black. This scene is the “La ci darem la mano,” of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (see video below).

Molière’s play on Don Juán is singularly devoid of eroticism. His Dom Juan is compiling conquests, as does Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. However, the catalogo Dom Juan keeps is a metaphorical rather than literal catalogo. Yet, at the beginning of the play (I. i) Sganarelle tells Gusman, Done Elvire’s escort and servant, that Dom Juan is the very devil. He is a grand seigneur [lord] méchant homme, an aristocrat, but an evil man.

Don%20Giovanni2

Don%20Giovanni%201

Don Giovanni by Angela Buscemi
www.teatrodimessina.it
(Photo credit: Google Images)

The Plot

In fact, other than the above-mentioned events the plot of Molière’s Dom Juan consists in a series of fruitless attempts to save Dom Juan from eternal damnation. The individuals begging Dom Juan to convert are Sganarelle (1), Dom Juan’s valet, Done Elvire (2), Dom Juan’s abandoned wife, and Dom Louis (3), Dom Juan’s father.

When Sganarelle warns his master, whom he calls a pèlerin, a pilgrim, that he may be punished, he is silenced immediately, not by an angry, but verbose or quiet Dom Juan. Sganarelle falls short of words and when his master will not speak, he collapses (III. i).

Noblesse oblige

Similarly, when Dom Louis, Dom Juan’s father, bemoans the fact that aristocracy is no longer as it was, Dom Juan listens, but does not hear. When Dom Louis is finished, Dom Juan simply invites him to sit down so he can speak more comfortably (IV. iv). In 1665, the noblesse oblige of earlier years has been replaced by self-interest.

Later (IV. vi), Done Elvire implores Dom Juan to mend his ways as God is about to strike. He lets her speak, but as she is leaving, he invites her to stay overnight. It is late. Done Elvire leaves. It is as though she had not spoken a word.

Dom Juan as faux dévot

At the beginning of act V, Dom Louis returns and praises his son who now feigns devotion. Dom Louis does not notice that Dom Juan is putting on an act. Moreover, it is as a faux dévot that Dom Juan dismisses Dom Carlos. He will not live with Done Elvire as man and wife, because it is God’s will (V. iii).

Retribution

However, Dom Juan has killed a Commandeur. There is a statue of the Commandeur with whom Dom Juan is to have dinner. At the appointed hour, the statue of the Commandeur takes him by the hand which causes the earth to move and engulf Dom Juan.

Conclusion

The above is an incomplete introduction to Molière’s Dom Juan, not to say le donjuanisme. I have left out the encounter with Francisque, a poor man, and uneven fight, &c. But this is a beginning.

RELATED ARTICLES

Bergamo: Arlecchino & Brighella (23 July 2014) ←
The Figaro Trilogy (14 July 2014)
Picasso in Paris (9 July 2014)
Picasso’s Harlequin (3 July 2014)
Arlecchino, Arlequin, Harlequin (30 June 2014)
Pantalone: la Commedia dell’arte (20 June 2014)

Sources and Resources

Dom Juan by Molière/Sganarelle
The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (Wikipedia)
Synopsis of Don Juan
Don Juan, trans. by Brett B. Dodemer, Digital Commons (pdf)
Don Juan, ou le Festin de pierre is Gutenberg’s [Ebook #5130] FR
Tartuffe; or, the Hypocrite is Gutenberg’s [Ebook #2027]

Baryton Dmitri Hvorostovsky has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. He’s being treated in the best facilities, in London, England, but these are shattering news. He has a very rich voice. I hope he soon recovers.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky died on 22 November 2017. May he rest in peace.

With kind regards to all of you. ♥

—ooo—

Don Giovanni, “La ci darem la mano”
Hvorostovsky & Fleming

Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Marc-André Hamelin rearranges… Chopin

04 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by michelinewalker in Humour, Music

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Frédéric Chopin, Humour, Marc-André Hamelin, Opus 64 No 1, Quebec pianist, The Minute Waltz

An Encore: The “Minute Waltz”

Marc-André Hamelin (b. 1961) is a Canadian virtuoso pianist and a composer, born and raised in Montreal, Quebec. No piece is too difficult for him. He has often praised the nun who taught him how to play the piano. His father should also be praised.

He is a graduate of L’École Vincent-d’Indy, in Montreal, and then studied at Temple University in Philadelphia.

He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, a fine location, with his second wife, Katie Fuller, a pianist and WGBH classical music broadcaster.

I need not tell you that Marc-André has a sense of humour.

The Minute Waltz is Frédéric Chopin’s Op 64, N^o1.

Love to everyone 💕

Hamelin in 2003 (Wiki2.org)

Dmitri Hvorostovsky sings Verdi

10 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by michelinewalker in Music, Opera

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alexandre Dumas fils, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, La Dame aux camélias, La Traviata by Verdi, Marie Duplessis, Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, The Queen of Spades by Pushkin

Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing aria from The Queen of Spades during reopening gala of the Bolshoi Theatre, 28 October 2011 (Caption and photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is so difficult to accept the death of Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. He was a powerful male singer with a “silver mane” (this description is not mine). Hvorostosky had brown hair, but it turned white in his early thirties. He passed away on 22 November 2017, at the age of 55.

Hvorostovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, on 16 October 1962, to what I would describe as an upper middle-class family. He came to the attention of music lovers everywhere when he won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, in 1989.

In the summer of 2015, Hvorostovsky announced that he had a brain tumour. After a short leave, he resumed his career, at a slower pace and briefly. An inoperable malignant brain tumour is merciless.

In the above photograph, he is singing an aria from Tchaikovsky‘s Queen of Spades, based on a short story, Pikovaha Dama (La Dame de pique) written during the fall of 1833 by Alexander Pushkin (26 May 1779 – 29 January 1837). Pushkin is also the author of the drama Boris Godunov (1833) and a novel in verse entitled Eugene Onegin. Eugene Onegin was serialized between 1848-1852 and it is the basis for Tchaikovsky‘s 1879 opera Eugene Onegin. The opera’s librettist was the composer’s brother Modest Tchaikovsky.

Verdi’s La Traviata

Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky was in good health when he sang Di Provenza, il mar, il suol, an aria from Giuseppi Verdi‘s La Traviata (1852), an opera derived from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils‘ (27 July 1824 – 27 November 1895) La Dame aux camélias (The Lady with/of the Camellias) (1848), or Camille, to an English-speaking audience. Dmitri Hvrostovsky is Giorgio Germont, trying to persuade his son, Alfredo, who loves Violetta, to return to Provence, the family home (Scene 2 of La Traviata).

The protagonist of Giuseppi Verdi‘s La Traviata (the fallen woman) is Violetta Valéry. Alexandre Dumas named his protagonist Marguerite Gautier. She had been Marie Duplessis (1824 – 1847) who wore a red camellia when she was menstruating, a message to her lovers. She was born Alphonsine Rose Plessis, in Normandy, to an abusive father who sold her when she was 15.

Marie Duplessis by Édouard Viénot

Marie Duplessis

At the age of 16, the beautiful Marie Duplessis conquered Paris. She bore a child to Charles Morny, duc de Morny, but the baby died a month after birth. The duc de Morny, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand‘s illegitimate grandson and a half-brother to Napoleon III, looked after Marie Duplessis, providing her with an apartment and transforming her into a refined courtesan and salonnière, the most famous in her days. She was Alexandre Dumas, fils’ lover and a lover to various aristocrats as well as composer Franz Liszt. Alexandre Dumas, fils, born in 1824, could not afford to marry her.

The lovely Marie Duplessis died of tuberculosis on 3 February 1847, at the age of 23. At her bedside were her husband, a brief marriage, the comte de Perregaux, and her former lover, the Baltic-German count Gustav Ernst von Stackelberg.

RELATED ARTICLES

The Dumas Dynasty: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (26 January 2014) the three Dumas
Dumas, père & Marguerite de Valois fictionalized (10 March 2012)

Sources and Ressources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH8QoBHfjOQ (video on Marie Duplessis)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Duplessis
https://www.britannica.com/search?query=La+Traviata

Love to everyone ♥

Hvorostosky sings Verdi’s Di Provenza, il mar, il suol

Dmitri Hvorostosky (Photo credit: TASS)

Fauré & Ravel : Nostalgia

05 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by michelinewalker in Music, Sharing, Son et image

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adele Bloch-Bauer, Art Nouveau, Gabriel Fauré, Gustav Klimt, memories, Peter Schlosser, the Nazi, Vienna Secession

6abriel Fauré, Élégie in C Minor for Cello & Piano Op. 24 (1880 – 1883)

Girl with Peacock by Peter Schlosser, 1896 (Photo credit: fleurdulys)

Peter Schlosser was an Austrian artist, in the days of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil and the Wiener Secession (the Vienna Secession). I found a post about him, but no entry. This above painting is dated 1896.

Gustav Klimt and other artists founded the Wiener Secession in April 1897. Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is dear to me because I was a friend of relatives, members in fact, of the Bloch-Bauer family. My friends were Hélène and Francis Gutmann. Francis, whose mother was a Bloch-Bauer, finished a PhD in physics, at the University of British Columbia, where I also completed a PhD. However, we had met in Victoria. I also met Mr. Bloch-Bauer, an uncle (I believe). He was an older gentleman at the time, the very late 60s. If my memory serves me well, he spoke French. Francis met his wife, my friend Hélène, in Montreal. He enjoyed playing the piano. The Nazis pillaged the family home. His brother-in-law, a prince, taught me the Viennese Waltz. Francis was born in Vienna and died in Montreal, in 2014.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/plundered-klimts-now-in-canada/article4143277/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&

Love to everyone ♥

Gabriel Fauré, Élégie in C Minor for Cello & Piano Op. 24

Paul Tortelier, violoncelle
Jean Hubeau, piano

Maurice Ravel, Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899)
Orchestre national de France

Lake George by John Frederick Kensett, Hudson River School (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 by Gustav Klimt, 1907

Casuistry, or how to sin without sinning

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by michelinewalker in France, Molière, Music, The Church

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Casuistry, Escobar y Mendoza, Henri IV of France, Henry VIII of England, Huguenot, Pascal's Lettres provinciales

King Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casuistry

The Fragmentation of the Western Church

When Antonio Escobar y Mendoza (1589 – 4 July 1669) published his Summula casuum conscientiæ (1627), the handbook of casuistry, the Roman Church had been severely fragmented. Escobar y Mendoza and Francisco Suárez (5 January 1548 – 25 September 1617), Jesuits, were therefore addressing an alarmed and vulnerable Western Church, a Church ready to use remedies it may not have otherwise contemplated. Casuistry all but took sinfulness out of sin. Consequently, it was attacked by Blaise Pascal, in his Lettres provinciales (1658-1659), and ridiculed by Molière (Tartuffe) and La Fontaine. But it allowed the king to sin.

Let us assess the damage

Henry VIII of England (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547; king: 21 April 1509 until his death), who was not allowed to divorce, ended up making himself head of the Church of England.
Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546), had confronted indulgence “salesman” Johann Tetzel, with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and opposed other practices, had also fragmented the Roman Catholic Church.
John Calvin (French, Jean Calvin, born Jehan Cauvin: 10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564) and French Huguenots, Calvinist Protestants, could easily point a guilty finger not at Jesus of Nazareth, but at the Church as a human institution. Calvin is the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1536.

To the above, we could add the Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598, by Henri IV who was both king of France and king of Navarre. The Edict of Nantes offered protection to the formerly persecuted Huguenots, which seemed the correct remedy, but Huguenots were not loyal to the Roman Church and were therefore a potential obstacle to absolutism in the eyes of cardinal-duc de Richelieu.

Richelieu may have been right when he suggested to Louis XIII that the Huguenots’ right to have “places fortes” (fortified communities), such as La Rochelle, could imperil absolutism, i.e. one king, one language, one religion. These “places fortes” could be turned into genuine fortified places. (See Siege of La Rochelle, Wikipedia.) However, did he have to let twenty-two thousand Huguenots starve to death?

Casuistry: origins

Casuistry, a recipe for ethical laissez-faire, does not find its origins in seventeenth-century Spain, or Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other casuists. In dates back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael (6 or 28 March 1483 – 6 April 1520). Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand, whilst Plato gestures to the heavens, representing his belief in The Form.

For example, casuistry has roots in ancient Rome and, especially, ancient Greece, and the Renaissance had given greater access to the knowledge of ancient Rome and Greece. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE)[i] proposes an examination of certain actions, not all, before judgment is passed with respect to their moral acceptability.

Casuistry and Jurisprudence

I should mention that casuistry has often been defined as jurisprudence applied to morality. For instance, the Ten Commandments do not permit the killing of a human being, but during a war that restriction is lifted. It is also lifted in the case of self-defence. As well, many countries have retained what other countries look upon as profoundly unethical: the death-penalty. This would suggest that the sinfulness of an action depends to a smaller or larger extent on circumstances and location. Jurisprudence is the study of cases (casuistry).

In other words, moral relativism is not new.

—ooo—

However, with casuistry, a sin could be rendered innocent using “methods” that manipulated reality, which Blaise Pascal could not accept, nor Molière, nor La Fontaine.

Casuistry: a general definition

There were great advantages to casuistry in that allowed the “grands” among the faithful to sin without sinning, which constitutes an unacceptable form of moral relativism and, by and large, benefits only the “grands” or the rich and powerful. Casuistry proposed “methods” that could be used to make a wrong a right. The most important of these “methods” or doctrines were:

la direction d’intention, or the end [l’intention] justifies the means (Machiavellian);
mental restriction (saying part of the truth out loud, but saying the rest silently, within oneself);
the doctrine des équivoques: using ambiguous or equivocal terms, to transform a message;
probability (one theologian who said “no” could be overruled by a theologian who said “yes” as both were theologians.

I am leaving out: easy devotion (la dévotion aisée), and dispensation from loving God (la dispense d’aimer Dieu) and there may be other “methods” or doctrines, but for a detailed account of the methods put forth by casuistry, one needs to read Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other proponents of casuistique, a task best performed by theologians.

Among the four “methods” or doctrines I have listed, the most disputed was the fourth: probability, which pitted one authority against another.

Henry VIII & Henri IV

The Church of England separated from the Roman Church because Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was not allowed to divorce Catherine of Aragon and having separated from the Roman Church, Henry VIII went on to have wives decapitated.

But let us look a the life of Henri IV of France who was a good king, but a womanizer who did not honour his promise to marry Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, should Gabrielle d’Estrées (1573 – 10 April 1599), his official mistress, pass away. Henri IV probably expected Gabrielle d’Estrées to live a long time, but she died of eclampsia on 10 April 1599, at the age of 26. A few months later, Henri married Marie de’ Medici, not Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, whom he had promised to marry.

Moreover, where was the Church, when Henri IV, a Protestant married Marguerite de Valois (14 May 1553 – 27 March 1615), a Catholic who did not want to marry him?Henri IV, king of Navarre, stood outside Notre-Dame de Paris while his wedding took place.

Henri IV abjured Protestantism on 25 July 1593, following the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, a Catholic, but he did so unconvincingly: “Paris vaut bien une messe.” (Paris [the crown] is well worth a mass.) He converted five years after his becoming king of France. I surmise he had to convert in order to be crowned, which meant he was seeking power.

Finally, in 1599, ten years after he became king of France (1589), Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled on the grounds that she could not bear him children, which may not have constituted valid grounds for an annulment had Henri IV not needed heirs and had he not been a “grand.” He had also had Gabrielle d’Estrées’ marriage annulled. So what happened to Henry VIII? Why was his marriage not annulled?

Henri IV, king of France and king of Navarre, was no choir boy. He loved women. But he may well have been the best king France ever had.

Adultery

In other words, what we see here is adultery which, according to Judaism’s Ten Commandments, is a sin. Unlike Henry VIII, Henri IV did not break with the Roman Church to marry another woman. Nor did he have wives decapitated. But he had an insatiable sexual appetite which he obviously felt free to indulge perhaps given his “divine rights of kings,” a notion he and Henry VIII had probably never heard of.

Moreover, it was not uncommon for monarchs whose marriages were arranged to keep an official mistress. Henri II of France, Marguerite de Valois’ father, was married to Catherine de’ Medici, but he had a mistress, the powerful Diane de Poitiers.

Opposition to Casuistry

In his Lettres provinciales (1656-1657), Blaise Pascal[ii] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), using a pseudonym, Louis de Montalte, condemned casuistry. Molière mocked it in Tartuffe (1664, 1666, 1669) a play he often revised to please “le parti des dévots” and escape the death penalty. As well, La Fontaine, bequeathed a long list of poems where the “grands” do with impunity what is not allowed of the “petits.”

—ooo—

In other words, the rapid breakdown of the Roman Church justified robust recourses, but did it justify taking sinfulness out of sin in aristocratic rather than plebeian circles. There can no doubt that circumstances play a role in determining whether some actions are ethically permissible. But can taking all sinfulness out of sinful actions be acceptable?

Pascal was not heard in his lifetime, but in 1679, “Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suárez (Catholic Encyclopedia) and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication.”[iii]

Ironically, if indeed casuistry was used to prevent further fragmentation of the Western Church, it was also an indictment of the Church, which can lead one to think that Pope Innocent XI perhaps saved the Western Church.
.

Love to everyone. ♥

_________________________

[i] “Aristotle.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle>

[ii] “Blaise Pascal.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2012.<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/445406/Blaise-Pascal>.

[iii] “Casuistry.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry>

Thomas Weelkes (baptised 25 October 1576 – 30 November 1623)

5 March 2012

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Gabrielle d’Estrées

(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)