Cultural Influence
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The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a long essay in his book Enten – Eller in which he argues, quoting Charles Gounod, that Mozart's Don Giovanni is "a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection." The finale, in which Don Giovanni refuses to repent, has been a captivating philosophical and artistic topic for many writers including George Bernard Shaw, who in Man and Superman parodied the opera (with explicit mention of the Mozart score for the finale scene between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni). Gustave Flaubert called Don Giovanni, along with Hamlet and the sea, "the three finest things God ever made." E. T. A. Hoffmann also wrote a short story derived from the opera, "Don Juan," in which the narrator meets Donna Anna and describes Don Juan as an aesthetic hero rebelling against God and society.
Read more about this topic: Don Giovanni
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or influence:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Constitutional statutes ... which embody the settled public opinion of the people who enacted them and whom they are to govern—can always be enforced. But if they embody only the sentiments of a bare majority, pronounced under the influence of a temporary excitement, they will, if strenuously opposed, always fail of their object; nay, they are likely to injure the cause they are framed to advance.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)