In analysing two “ stage entrance ” occurences of the libertine, Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni (1787) and Stravinsky and Auden’s The Rake’s Progress (1951), the article highlights transformations in the relationship towards death and the dead in Europe. Both operas also represent the rise and fall of the myth of Dom Juan and of this connection between the themes of the inconstancy of love and that of the insult and invitation to the dead.