The theme of the abandoned woman in the mythical Greek-Roman stories reoccur a figure of the heroine who fell in love with a stranger, it helps him in a difficult task, being somewhat less than the duties that bind the family and their homeland; then follows it, often far away, only to be betrayed and abandoned. In the Mythology, here are three different famous heroines abandoned: Dido, Medea and Ariadne, women united by the fact that she loved so much that then the men have abandoned. As well, I will discuss the characters of Agnes from Matthäus asimir von Collin’s Der Tod Friedrichs des Streitbaren, Gretchen from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and finally Donna Elvira from Wolfgang A. Mozart and Lorenzo DaPonte’s Don Giovanni.
Dido, Queen of Carthage , was in love with the hero Aeneas and was totally under the thumb of his love, the grip of the "furor", the passion of love that led her to think only of his relationship with Aeneas and cancel itself both as a woman that as queen. In Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas “Thy hand, Belinda…When I am laid in earth” comes near the end of the third and final act of the opera. It portrays Dido’s desperate state of mind that results in her suicide. In the aria, Dido is
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I’ve come to a cross roads with the idea of Elvira as a “Donna Abbandonata”. Is she truly a “Donna Abbandonata”? I believe she is, however, not in the completely traditional sense as seen in Mythological heroines, Ariadne and Dido. Elvira is a closely related heroine to Medea and the pure Gretchen. She is a dedicated person having one been a bride of God, but now belongs to Don Giovanni This demonstrates why she is so mentally disturbed by being seduced, deceived, then abandoned by Giovanni. She is a passionate figure, willing to sacrifice herself for her lover or hound him to his