With autumn the theatrical tradition of representing Don Juan Tenorio from All Saints’ Eve to All Souls’ Day. It is curious that, while some theaters barely maintain it today, more and more municipalities have rescued it and instituted it as a cultural festival.
In Alcalá de Henares it has been staged outdoors since 1984, with famous actors in the leading roles, and in Guadalajara there are a hundred fans who in the Mendoza family’s Palacio del Infantado relive the call Tenorio Mendocino. Similar performances of the Tenorio take place throughout the country, a sign of the popular favor won by a play like no other in the Spanish repertoire has achieved.
This drama brought fame and popularity to its author during his lifetime, and thanks to him José Zorrilla (1817-1893) was crowned the great dramatic poet of Spanish romanticism. However, the conflictive relationship he had with her is striking. It is natural for authors to be ashamed of some work from their youth, but their case is not the specific repudiation of a beginner’s exercise. The poet was critical of all his dramatic works, but his relationship with the Tenorio She became obsessive, and her disaffection for the character she had created increasingly grew. This is proven by the various attacks he made throughout his life in writings and public events. He went so far as to say: “My don Juan is the greatest nonsense I have ever written… There is no drama in which I have accumulated more madness and implausibility.”
Zorrilla became his most virulent critic, especially in his adulthood, when out of necessity he was forced to leave the poets’ guild for that of journalists, seeking to support himself and his family. Then he abandoned verse and at the age of 64 began to serially publish a series of prose articles in Mondays of El Imparcial under the title Memories of old timefundamentally memories of his adventurous and showbiz life in Spain, Europe and America, and in which we read repeatedly: “In the month of October, Don Juan maintains all the theaters in Spain and the Spanish Americas. Is it fair that the one who supports so many dies in the hospital or in the asylum for having produced his Don Juan at a time when the law of literary property did not exist?
He Tenorio Zorrilla wrote it very young, at 27 years old, and premiered it immediately, in the spring of 1844 at the Teatro de la Cruz in Madrid, with a regular reception that increased in the following months and became the great success of the Spanish theater until well into the 20th century.
The author sold the work when intellectual property rights were not legally recognized or protected and he was irritated that others were getting rich off of it while he had to be content with fame, tributes and functions for his benefit. It is understandable that a man who spent his entire life worried about money, fighting with businessmen and publishers over economic issues, embarking on various businesses and complaining that “we poets cannot live off of air,” would be bothered by the non-retroactivity of a brand new law that did not protect the greatest theatrical success of the moment, its Tenoriobut neither did the rest of his dramatic works.
Zorrilla’s love-hate relationship with his Don Juan He finds many other reasons: a case of impersonation of the poet by his character who would deserve the psychoanalyst’s couch is conjectured. For his part, the playwright José Luis Alonso de Santos points out a more academic reason: a settling of accounts with the romantic movement that he had represented as a young man at a time when he has to write again out of necessity, when he is already a mature writer. in a literary environment dominated by realism and naturalism.
Certainly Don Juan Tenorio is the fruit of the imagination of a young romantic poet, while the self-criticism belongs to an old writer who sees that his time has passed and who is reproached for not having known how to retire in time: “The twenty-two years that I was absent from my homeland made me “They civilly killed the spirit of the generation that did not see me, and I returned as a resurrected person who suffers the effects and witnesses the spectacle of his posthumous fame.”
The poet threatened several times to publish an essay that he was going to title Don Juan before the conscience of his author and in which he would relate the conflictive moral relationship with his character. He never did. But according to Professor Piero Menarini, he did write a lot on the subject, especially after 1877, when he premiered his adaptation of the work into zarzuela; then, in a benefit performance given to him by the businessman Felipe Ducazcal at the Spanish Theater in November 1879 and in which he read some roundels at the end of the performance of his drama; and later in the article “Four words about my Don Juan Tenorio”, which appeared on May 10, 1880 in The Impartial (and incorporated and augmented in the first volume of Memories of old time).
The curse of don Juan
In the passages that he reads in the Spanish Theater he confesses that he suffers from Don Juan’s curse, since his character (thanks to the fame he has achieved) drags him with him wherever he goes, with the difference that, while Don Juan is always young, he grows old. He suffers from a kind of schizophrenia: Don Juan exists thanks to him, but he already lives alone, he does not need the author; On the contrary, Zorrilla, who left the country, continues to be remembered by the public thanks to the character:
Happy wasted desire!
Returning from a foreign land,
I found that there was in Spain
lived by me don Juan.
More extensive and detailed is the self-criticism of the work that he makes in the article by The Impartial. He says that he was commissioned to write a drama for the actor Carlos Latorre that he had to solve in twenty days. He intended a recasting of The mocker of Seville by Tirso de Molina and without any other literary reference, he began with the second act, from some mannered skeins that occurred to him one sleepless night.
Then he drew up a plan to preserve “Moreto’s mocked wife, and make a novice of the Commander’s daughter, whom my don Juan had to take out of the convent so that there would be defilement, desecration, sacrilege and all the other stitches of such darning.” And he adds: “It is easy to understand that such a poorly thought-out work could not turn out well.”
In this drama, the young Zorrilla poured many of his concerns and desires into portraying his hero, who at first functions as his alter ego. He himself confesses in his memoirs: “When writing this quatrain, it was more me saying it than my character Don Juan.” It is also a work that confronts parents with children, perhaps a reflection of the conflictive relationship that the author had with his father and that, as he reveals in his memoirs, tormented his conscience throughout his entire life. What is significant about the self-criticism is that Zorrilla changes sides by now aligning himself with the parents by behaving as such in front of his depraved literary son.
His criticism is fundamentally a moral judgment of Don Juan, in which he demystifies and disapproves of him from the perspective of a mature writer, a man of nonconforming character and robust Christian faith who created a creature, a golem, that he can no longer straighten. For this reason he prefers to replace his hero with the nun Doña Inés: “My work has an excellence that will make it last a long time on the stage (…) the creation of my Christian Doña Inés. (…) The one who has no character, the one who has enormous defects, the one who stains my work is Don Juan; The one who supports it, the one who evaluates it, illuminates it and gives it relief is Doña Inés; I am proud to be the creator of Doña Inés and sad for not having known how to create Don Juan. The people applaud him and laugh at his thanks, as his family would applaud those of a poorly raised skull (…). Don Juan always makes mistakes, Doña Inés always channels the scenes that he overflows.”
In his analysis he points out dramaturgical errors in the first act, where everything happens in one hour because “these hours of two hundred minutes are exclusively typical of my don Juan’s clock.” And he mocks the lack of verisimilitude of some of the most famous verses (those from the so-called sofa scene, which, by the way, there is no sofa that counts in the stage directions) that Don Juan says when he runs away at full speed from as many as They want to avenge their deceptions: “In this highly dramatic situation, that lover who, due to his passion, has trampled and is willing to trample on everything that is respectable and sacred in the world, when he knows very well that they will not be able to remain there for five minutes, it does not occur to him to talk to his beloved other than how good it is there where you can smell the flowers, hear the fisherman’s song and the chirps of the nightingales. This explains, in his opinion, why there is no actor who can say these verses well.
He ironically justifies his right to judge his work and, already involved in the job of critic, he even expresses what theater criticism should be like: “Would it be possible, although it would be inconceivable to me, that the critic would be offended that I, to my sixty-four years, when settling accounts with my conscience, said about my Don Juan what she, either out of consideration for the author or because she did not dare to go against the current of opinion, has not said in the same thirty-three years? It is impossible; Criticism has to be noble and loyal in Spain, as its people are, and can never become unfair, correcting only the author, not granting or allowing him anything, nor even recognizing and correcting his defects without correcting bad taste, when It misleads the judgments of the public and the art of the actors, causing the excesses and faults of the companies: all of which constitutes what is called theater, which is not only the written word of the poet.
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