On October 29, 1787, the opera Don Giovanni was performed for the first time at the National Theatre in Prague, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducting and with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, and the work was a success in the city that had already taken his Marriage of Figaro to its heart. The opera had been written to a commission from Prague, and it was finished in a hurry after Mozart had lost time over the summer. He had arrived in the city in October and rehearsals were short. The work was late.
The subject was the old story of the Spanish nobleman Don Juan, and the libretto turned it into a drama with a serious and a comic side running together, in which a man who lives by seduction and by violence refuses every chance to change and is finally carried off by the statue of a man he has killed. The music moves between the two moods, and the last scene, where the statue takes his hand, is one of the most famous in opera. The overture was said to have been written the night before.
The first performance was well received, and the opera was then produced in Vienna in 1788 in a revised version, and it spread through Europe in the following decades and was performed in other cities and in translations, and it became one of the central works of the repertory, and its final scenes were admired by later composers. The part of the servant Leporello carries much of the comedy. The stage was busy.
The opera is still performed wherever opera is performed, and its story has been told again in plays, films and other music, including works by Pushkin, Byron and the Danish writer Kierkegaard, who wrote a long essay on it. The story is famous. The theatre in Prague where it was first given is now known as the Estates Theatre, and the building is preserved, and performances are still held there.