 Well good afternoon everybody and thanks for being here this is really a wonderful opportunity to get to to speak and I hope we can exchange some ideas later with some real residents of San Francisco and it's so fantastic that we're here to talk about this book in the San Francisco Public Library because of course Don Quixote is above all things a book about books about how to read them and how to write them and the effect that they have on our lives after all books and stories are what motivate Alonso Quijano to become Don Quixote and launch himself on a different road using the freedom that the consul talked about to decide where he's going to go in life. Now I don't know how many of you have actually read Don Quixote I hope everybody but if not not to worry because even if you haven't read the book it probably feels like you have because the protagonists are so familiar to us all they're so familiar to the popular imagination. Don Quixote and Sancho are everywhere in all forms of the arts in film, television, painting, ballet, opera, art, classical music, rock music, the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, and popular culture. So there's a cumulative iconography that exists that has made the novel a touchstone for Western culture. So if you start to think about it Don Quixote is also found in the most incongruous places. For example in advertisements. He's in advertisements for clothing, for banks, for Honda automobiles. He's also present constantly in political and other cartoons. It's a very popular cartoon. There's a wonderful New Yorker cover of Don Quixote and Sancho with his lance and of course what is he fighting? Not a windmill but a ventilator. So they're all over the place also in newspapers and the media. Politicians love to make reference to Don Quixote and being quixotic. So social commentary is a very popular venue for Don Quixote also. In our own San Francisco of course in Golden Egg Park this is a statue of a bust of Cervantes and Don Quixote and Sancho are kneeling at his feet paying homage to Cervantes. And in fact because he's everywhere Don Quixote the character is as alive as as many historical figures and perhaps even more so the Spanish philosopher Miguel Leunamuno said many decades ago what difference is there between our memory of a historical figure and a literary one. They're actually exactly the same in our minds. I'm going to speak briefly today about the novel's influence in other artistic media specifically in dance, in music, and in television. So to start off with dance the key example is Péter Pá's 1869 ballet Don Quixote of which I must say the San Francisco ballet does a lovely version and whenever it plays do try and go to see it. Now the ballet was in great part a vehicle to bring traditional Spanish dance to the ballet stage. Péter Pá was born in Marseille and he spent several years in Spain and I think this is where he got the idea to put Don Quixote into dance. It's very typical of late 19th century romantic ballet. It's a light-hearted comedy loosely based on the story of Camacho's wedding. It incorporates Spanish dance, stylized flamenco, bull fighters, all with an Andalusian atmosphere. Now this contrasts of course with the novel which is purely Castilian, purely Manchegan. It has nothing to do with Andalusia. And in the ballet Don Quixote and Sancho are not protagonists. They're really more background figures that kind of walk in and out of the ballet in the background to provide atmosphere. The ballet doesn't address the more philosophical issues of the novel except for the notion of freedom, freedom once again to choose a marriage partner. And this whole, the whole episode of Camacho's wedding is resolved happily in the ballet and in the novel. Above all the ballet is a vehicle of entertainment. This is what Petri was doing. He wants to entertain an audience. And this is exactly what Cervantes does too with his novel. He elevates the literature of pure entertainment and he makes it listed. What is interesting, I think, is how the novel nourishes a radically different artistic medium. And by the way, if you haven't seen the ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, you can see there's a wonderful video of Berishnikov plays the lead and it's put on by the American Ballet Theater. And everything you can see on YouTube today. So you can see it on the computer. So music. There's a long, very long tradition of musical interpretations of the novel. Dating from the 17th century, there are at least 50 musical compositions inspired by the story of Don Quixote. So there are composers such as... Now these are all classical composers, right? So such as Telman, Masené, Minkas, Ravel and Faia. They have all adapted the novel to opera, to incidental music, to plays, symphonic poems, songs, ballets, operas, musicals and film, the music in film. I'm going to speak a little bit... Well, before that, also Don Quixote is very much alive in modern music, in popular music. There's a Spanish heavy metal group, Mago de Oz, they have... Of course, it's my students that find these things, right? They have a wonderful song called Molinos de Viento, right? The windmills. There's Gordon Lightfoot sings Don Quixote and of course there's La Mancha and The Impossible Dream, who everybody knows, right? Whether or not you've read the novel. And they're all over YouTube, right? I mean, The Impossible Dream. If you look it up on YouTube, you'll get versions by Richard Kiley, the original singer, by Elvis Presley and Sergio Granados, among many, many other people. But I'm going to speak a bit more in detail about Richard Strauss's Symphonic Tone Poem. And this is one of the most famous musical compositions based on the novel. Now, a tone poem is an orchestral piece that's inspired by a work of literature. And normally the audience is given a program or a text that they read before listening to the work so that they know what's being represented in this work. Now, even though Strauss composed during the 19th century romantic period, his piece called Variations on... What is it? Fantastic variations on the theme of nightly... Something further. And I think if it just is themes on Don Quixote. And this music does not reflect his time, the romantic interpretation of Don Quixote, which is the artist as individual genius, the novel as a struggle between the real and the ideal. Don Quixote and Sancho as mythic figures. And the presumption that satire and comedy are the product of inferior spirits. Instead, Strauss presents a comic and burlesque Don Quixote. So the audience goes from this silent literary reading to an oral and collective experience. The music doesn't represent anything specific. It's intended to evoke feelings and ideas. In other words, the music wears a certain expression. And Strauss tells us that that expression is the expression of Don Quixote's soul. So for example, the introductory movement uses cacophony and a very rapid tempo to represent Alonso Quijano's fall into madness. We listeners experience his madness as if we were here or we were in his head. Another variation evokes Don Quixote's battle with the sheep. The music starts as very triumphalist, very militaristic. But it ends in the sheep's frantic bleeding. All done with musical instruments, of course. Real musical instruments. So the type of cultured expression we normally associate with an orchestra becomes low, even vulgar. And this passage with the bleeding sheep outraged the audiences of the time who protested very vociferously in Germany and in France. The 19th century public had more serious expectations. In contrast to the romantic philosopher's interpretation of Don Quixote as a tragedy, the death of chivalry, Strauss emphasized the comic, ironic and parodic elements of the novel. These same elements would be stressed at the end of the 20th century by Anglo-American literary critics with their reinterpretation of Don Quixote as it was originally intended to be, a funny book. Now we'll go on to television. I'm speaking mainly about American television. And as I said before, now that we have digital access to just about everything, anything, any time we have YouTube, Netflix, streaming and web archived television series, so it's possible to see the breadth of reincarnations this novel has undergone on American television and therefore how it's framed in the American imaginary. For students now, their first contact with Don Quixote is usually through a television cartoon of which there have been numerous. For example, the pre-television 1934 Quixote illustrated by Walt Disney's collaborator of iWorks has no dialogue, only sound effects, and it's very much in the distinctive style of early Disney. Everything that I'm going to mention today you can find on YouTube by the way. So in it, Don Quixote's mad from reading books of chivalry and institutionalized in a padded cell escapes on a cart horse. He transforms windmills into giants and defeats them. He mistakes an opera singer for a damsel in distress and to save her vanquishes a back hole transformed into a dragon. At the end, he returns to the institution where he and his jailer lock themselves in the cell and burn Don Quixote's books. Obviously, a very foreshortened and primitive adaptation, it does relay the reality fantasy dichotomy and of course the dangers of obsessive reading. One of the major themes of the book. iWorks is only one in a long line of animated Quixotes. One of the most amusing is the two-part Mr. McGoo's Don Quixote de la Mancha from the 60s. And it's actually quite faithful to the novels in two parts. And most of the major episodes in the novel are included, most of the significant episodes. And the only truly discordant element is that the characters speak in a jumble of accents and Sancho uses a very cliché Hollywood Mexican accent who I think is done by Mel Blanc. A very amusing twist is that unlike Cervantes's Don Quixote who transforms reality, of course Mr. McGoo can't literally cannot see it. In 1998, the children's public television series Wishbone aired an episode called The Imposable, P-A-W-S Imposable Dream. Wishbone is a little dog, by the way. And the program Wishbone was created to introduce school children to classic literature and encourage a love of reading. The canine protagonist bridges life and literature by appearing in signature scenes from the novels wearing impossibly cute costumes. So Wishbone, the dog plays Sancho Pumplon, of course he talks. And one of the fantasy sequences focuses on Don Quixote's battle with the windmills, offering children the iconic message of a rugged individual who strives to follow his dreams against all odds. Although from a novel written 400 years ago, this message would seem to me to be quintessentially American. Be yourself and never give up. This seems to be the focus of many television adaptations of the novel. Perhaps the closest fictional narrative to Don Quixote is the American Western, given its focus on the writing of wrongs. For example, in the show that I don't know how many of you here will remember or will have seen reruns of the show Have Gone Will Travel, from the late 50s and early 60s. And there the hero, Paladin, obviously a very meaningful name, is a soldier of fortune and a gentleman gunfighter who lives in his vaguely post-Civil War San Francisco. In the episode A Night to Remember and it's Night with a K, Paladin is hired to locate a wealthy owner, landowner who's gone mad and disappeared. And Don Esteban believes he's Don Quixote, he dresses in armor and he's engaged in writing wrongs and fighting off his sworn enemy, the giant Caracoliambro. And those of you who know Spanish know that this is a very provocative and funny name, which also appears in the book. So Paladin befriends this would-be knight and discovers that actually the heir who hired him was hoping that he would kill his father. When the son attacks the gunfighter, Paladin shoots him, thus slaying the real Caracoliambro. The connections to Alonso Quixote's self-transformation and knightly aspirations resonate a great deal here, as the novel is adapted to the Wild West setting. Don Esteban slays cattle, steers, instead of windmills, he wears armor that his grandfather brought over from Spain, supposedly in the south or in Mexico. And he transforms the stage depot into an inn. The episode is directed to an adult audience with its own aspirations of romanticized heroism, fighting the good fight and westernizing the story within cowboy parameters. Many subsequent TV shows, including CSI, feature characters and plot twists based on the adventures of Don Quixote as crime fighter and seeker of justice. I'll finish by commenting briefly on Peter Yates' 2000 adaptation featuring John Lithgow as Don Quixote. Who's seen it? Did anybody see this 2000? My feelings, exactly. Anyway, they spent a lot of money on this, so it's a TV movie, a movie made for TV. It was beautifully filmed entirely in Spain, and La Mancha has never looked better. But this, of course, is because it's not filmed in La Mancha. It was filmed in the white villages of Andalucía, in southern Spain, where Don Quixote never went. Yates occasionally falls into silly stereotypes, such as staging a flamenco show in a Manchegan inn. I think that perhaps a rationale was that the American public would not recognize Spain without flamenco bullfights or castles. Most disappointing are the interpolations of contrived events and scenes that don't appear in the novel, as well as very distracting special effects. What distinguishes this Don Quixote is the attention to elaborate production elements such as these attractive locations and lavish costuming. However, even the latter flounders is the drink and Duchess appear playing croquet and wearing costumes that would be better suited to a masterpiece theater production set in Edwardian Yorkshire. I don't want to be mean, but this is a really heartfelt attempt by Lithgow, who's an extremely cultured, accomplished and versatile actor who attempted for years to get a Don Quixote film made. But like previous film adaptations, it just doesn't succeed on the small screen. Curiously enough, the more circumscribed attempts in various television genres, those that use the Don Quixote character as an imprint and allegory, or even a humorous wink to the viewer. Sorry about that. They seem to succeed where these long... It's Lithgow. They seem to fail. They seem sort of destined to fail. Now, Don Quixote has whimsical dreamer, as visionary, as madman and defender of the weak, has found his niche in primetime television cameos. But the protean and evolving, dignified, yet comic, sublime, supremely complex and larger than like Don Quixote is yet to be captured on American television. Excuse me. This is the crux of the problem. We're translating the novel to the small screen or the big screen or to any other artistic medium. Can they or should we expect them to do justice to such a massive, complex and subtle work? Just last year, another film version of Don Quixote was produced by the actor James Franco, and also a very cultured person. And it was directed and written by a series of multiple film students at USC. And I had the opportunity to speak to them after the reviewing and they all agreed that the whole project was crazy, a crazy quixotic adventure since no screen version could ever do justice to the novel and so many people have failed trying. So to conclude, Don Quixote is a prodigious and ubiquitous cultural icon and I haven't even mentioned art painting. It's a metaphor for human existence and our relationship with the world. It suggests a meaningful way of life. Life lived as an exploration, a challenge, a dream to pursue. The fact that this particular novel has inspired so many practitioners from so many different artistic media is proof of the ongoing power of literature to move us. So if you haven't read it, please do. Thank you.