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Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the two enduring, endearing characters created by the novelist-short-story-writer-playwright Miguel de Cervantes, in 1605, for his novel, Don Quixote, are with us in that ineluctable way only the most creative, the most original, and the most complicated fictional creations can be. Like Santa Claus or Peter Pan, like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, like Ahab, Babar, and Stuart Little, the self-anointed knight-errant and his proverb-spouting squire remain some four hundred years after their introduction to the Spanish public both themselves and a thousand other things. They represent the theoretical; through Cervantes's satirically sympathetic portrayal-one made crazy by reading ridiculous books, the other representative of the commonsensical (as least as far as his insights allow)-the universe can be nicely divided up between them: they are Kirk and Spock, Laurel and Hardy, Seinfeld and Costanza, arguing over nothing, and signifying everything.

If literature were a competitive sport, then Don Quixote is all the Olympic gold medals rolled into one, and Cervantes is Michael Phelps, able to do it all. With the upcoming Friends of Chamber Music presentation of Don Quijote De La Mancha, performed by the illustrious Hespèrion XXI with Jordi Savall on viola da gamba and special guest F. Murray Abraham reading excerpts, it is an appropriate time to collect some stats and consider this novel, known, indeed, as the first modern novel. After no less than the Bible, no other book has been delivered in so many forms and translations: by one count, seven hundred editions around the world have been published. Novelists as varied as Lawrence Sterne, Flaubert, Tobias Smollett (who translated one edition), Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Milan Kundera have been strongly influenced by its picaresque world-view. Faulkner reread it every year (and García Márquez read Faulkner, so in his prose the reader jumps four hundred years in a single sentence).

The strong characters have made for exuberant adaptations musically, from Richard Strauss's tone poem, operas by Mendelssohn, Massenet, and Georg Telemann, to orchestrations by Ravel and Henry Purcell. The great Russian choreographer Petipa worked with Léon Minkus on a ballet, later Balanchine made his own ballet, and both Nureyev and Baryshnikov danced the story. Movie versions have been made in the silent era (the first version, in 1898, was a year prior to the first filmed version of Shakespeare's plays) and the sound: famously, Orson Welles tried for years to finish his version (oddly, two private collectors in Europe have unseen footage); infamously, Terry Gilliam saw his film collapse when the set was destroyed-a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, confirms the heroic bumbler's cruel fate is reflected in the absurdities poured on his brethren. Even Disney views the world through 'don'-colored glasses: a rumor abounds that Pixar's next animated feature, Up, is one more adaptation. How can one complain, when, after all, every Don Quixote needs his Sancho, and everyone needs Don Quixote, perhaps now more than ever?

If some aspect of the novel appears in every art work influenced by its larger-than-life characters and their creator's perfect sense of timing-for tragedy as much as for its celebrated comedy-it is only natural. The version most people know, the musical Man of La Mancha written by Dale Wasserman, with its hummable hit "The Impossible Dream," incorporates the book's most famous scenes: Don Quixote thinking windmills are giants, wearing a wash basin for a helmet on his head, and defending his illusory love, Dulcinea. Yet these set-pieces, while memorable, only scratch the surface of the novel, which embodies life as fully as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. Description, detail, delight: page after page, the reader comes across scenes and dialogue that might have been written yesterday, or tomorrow. Cervantes' proclaimed goal-to destroy the chivalric romances that had originated before the Middle Ages and included such classics as Beowulf, The Song of Roland and the Italian Orlando Furioso but by the 16th century had degenerated into standard heroic tales, like Hollywood comedies-was clearly achieved: within months of Don Quixote's initial circulation, no new chivalric romances were published and a new literary age set in. Cervantes brought psychology to the narrative form, in effect creating the novel as a distinct storytelling structure. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, while built on the backs of hundreds of stock characters seeking adventures and proffering advice, were quickly understood as unique characters in their own rights. Because they are so open, so universal in their fictional portraits, artists from all kinds of other mediums have found them to be personal vessels.

Realistic interpretations, such as the engravings made by Gustave Doré in 1863, are one way to respond to Cervantes' imagination; musical interpretations are purer, still. Jordi Savall's method of researching music of the time creates a cause-and-effect; he takes us not so much into the novel but through it, back to Cervantes' age when Spain was the confirmed world power and the Church doctrine reigned supreme in the guise of the Inquisition. The famous book-burning scene in chapter six is but one example of Cervantes' stand against the authorities. Things have not changed much; Don Quixote's housekeeper, in whose eagerness to consign her master's library to the fire in the corral "she saved herself a trip down the stairs and tossed them all out the window," might well be the Nazis, the Taliban, or the telegenic Sarah Palin. Mad for all the world to see, armed only with his lance and a method to his madness, Don Quixote stands like a dark knight-errant against every enemy of the imagination. He does not stand alone.

Don Quixote with Jordi Savall, Hespèrion XXI and F. Murray Abraham, presented by The Friends of Chamber Music will perform at Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral on Friday, October 24, 8 pm.
For tickets or information, call 816-561-9999 or online at www.chambermusic.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.