Don Juan

Don Juan is a “fictitious character who is a symbol of libertinism.” He is a figure of old popular legend and emerged as literary personality for the first time in Tirso de Molina’s tragedy “El burlador de Sevilla” (“The seducer of Seville”) in 1630 and after that Don Juan became a villain in several novels, plays and poems. The best known appearance of the fictitious character Don Juan is probably in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” (Giovanni is the Italian equivalent for Juan), premiered in 1787.

The story or the legend of Don Juan is basically that he seduces a girl of an honorable family. When the father of the defiled girl tries to take vengeance, Don Juan kills him. When Don Juan visits the grave, he eyes the commemorative effigy of the murdered father and invites it to dinner. The stone ghost in fact comes for dinner and appears as harbinger of Don Juan’s death and slowly but surely Don Juan’s enemies compel him to destruction, although he tries to withstand even the ghostly forces of the unknown with might and main. In the end the womanizer Don Juan refuses to repent and is eternally damned. Summarizing it is a tale about human egoism, damnability as well as human evanescence.

In English language “Don Juan” is used for men who gave or give many women sexual satisfaction, gratification, but also in a less raunchy sense: “sometimes people call friends or people who are smooth with ladies Don Juan”