Don Giovanni - he conquers hearts and breaks them, he wins people over only to repel them again, and he can't help it: that's his game. When Don Giovanni is about to make a pass at Donna Anna, he is surprised by her father and kills the once influential Commendatore in a duel. He goes unnoticed, of course. Skill is the capital of the seducer. Until now. Because when Anna takes her fiancé Ottavio under her wing to avenge her father's death, Giovanni meets his ex Elvira and then identifies the newly engaged Zerlina as his next target for seduction, his usual powers fail him. "So ends he who does evil. And the death of evildoers is always like their life," it says when Don Giovanni succumbs to his own cunning and it is actually the Commendatore's statue that overcomes him and banishes him to hell.
Like Don Giovanni himself, the congenial duo of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte defy the unwritten law in their opera to find their way back to social discipline and order in the end - but who wants this boring, lackluster order without the heartbreaker anyway? Mozart's comic-tragic masterpiece about the Don Juan myth is rightly regarded as one of the greatest of its genre.