Wenzel Mihule and the Reception of Don Giovanni in Central Europe

Abstract

This article traces the previously overlooked transmission of a German Singspiel adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled Don Juan, oder Die redende Statue, the adaptation originated with the troupe of Wenzel Mihule at the Patriotic Theater in Prague in the early 1790s and, initially at least, took fewer liberties with the opera than other German reworkings, possibly because it was created in an environment sensitive to Mozart’s Italian original. The adaptation was picked up by Emauel Schikaneder’s company in Vienna, by companies across Moravia, and by Joseph Seconda’s troupe in Leipzig and Dresden, and it traveled with Mihule from Prague to southern Germany and Slovakia. Newly discovered archival documents associated with Mihule’s Don Juan shed light on the early German-language history of Don Giovanni, illustrating, in particular, its reception outside of large urban centers—in smaller towns, aristocratic palaces, and a monastery. This article argues, moreover, that the lack of scholarly attention to the adaptation is to a large extent connected to national politics in central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically to Czech-German ethnic tensions and conflicts.