[1] The story is told in the first person by a traveller who describes his experience watching Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in a theatre adjacent to his hotel.
During the interlude, the traveller turns around and sees that the stranger is Donna Anna, a character from Don Giovanni.
Afterwards, he goes to dine in the hotel restaurant and overhears other audience members discussing the performance; they do not rate it highly, and focus on the appearances of the actors.
Don Juan has spawned many different interpretations, although most critics accept that the story plays out on two "diametrically opposed planes";[2] that of the opera and that of the real world outside.
[4] Donna Anna is, to Birgit Röder, "an example of the extreme Romantic individual who can find fulfilment only in death".