OTHER STUFF
This year has seen the publication of two major
Lorenzo Da Ponte biographies, Rodney Bolt's The
Librettist of Venice (Bloomsbury,
July 2006) and Anthony Holden's The
Man Who Wrote Mozart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January 2006).
Listen to the NPR podcast of Renée Motagne's 28 July 2006 interview with
author Rodney Bolt on Morning
Edition.
Da Ponte wrote a memoir notorious for being partly apocryphal but totally
picaresque. Unfortunately, he doesn't recall much of his experience
with Mozart. Begun when he was 60, its English translation by Elizabeth
Abbott was first published in 1929 and is available in three editions
at The New York Public
Library. |
The
revised and augmented edition of Da Ponte's memoirs, published in 1829–1830.
It was originally published as a smaller volume in 1807 (Storia compendiousa
della vita di Lorenzo Da Ponte), and then as a three-volume work published
serially from 1823 to 1829.
Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
Columbia University. |
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NEW
YORK'S MOZART LINK
Da Ponte: Librettist, Grocer, Columbia
Professor
2006 abounds in celebrations worldwide recognizing the 250th anniversary
of W.A. Mozart's birth year, the most ambitious in Austria with Salzburg
alone carrying out 260 concerts, 55 masses and 22 operas. In Vienna,
The Jewish Museum in cooperation with the Da Ponte Institute
ran a six month exhibition on Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte
(1749-1838). Once seen as an equal or even more significant than the
composer, the librettist is now often peripheral on a work's billing.
Having spent the last 33 years of his life in New York City, Da Ponte
holds special allure for New Yorkers, and in the last two decades his
fascinating life has drawn more attention.
Raised in the Jewish ghetto of Ceneda in northern Italy, Lorenzo Da Ponte
converted to Christianity at age 13, enrolled in the seminary and was
ordained in 1773. Thereafter he headed to Venice, where he befriended
Casanova and Gozzi. Licentious and self-assured, Da Ponte led a scandalous
life in Venice and was exiled at 30 for liberal views expressed
in a 1776 poem entitled, L'Americano in Europa (An American
in Europe).
After stints translating librettos and arranging plays with friend and
poet Mazzolà, Da Ponte headed to Vienna in 1781 and fell under
the favor of Joseph II, who appointed him poet to the esteemed Italian
Theater. Da Ponte translated works from French to Italian, tweaking and
adapting libretti and generating originals
for Viennese composers Antonio Salieri, Martin y Soler, Mozart and Giovanni
Paisiello, whose operas were most widely performed in Vienna at the time.
Aware of Da Ponte's significant talents, Mozart was eager to team up
for a new opera, and it apparently took Da Ponte six weeks to transform
Beaumarchais's play, La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro (1784),
into a libretto. A hit at its second performance in Prague in 1786, Le
nozze di Figaro, K492 was followed by a commission for Don Giovanni,
K527 in 1787. To Da Ponte's dismay, Mozart saw the librettist as subordinate
to the composer, but both had similar ambitions and grew closer; having
roomed in adjacent apartments, the pair would shout back and forth through
windows. The last commission was Così fan tutte K588 (1790),
his sole original libretto for Mozart.
Following the deaths of Joseph II and Mozart, Da Ponte became embroiled
in court intrigue and was fired in 1791. He married an Englishwoman,
Ann (Nancy) Grahl and took off for Paris and London, where he was appointed
to the King's Theatre, Haymarket. Da Ponte arranged operas by Cimarosa,
worked again with Soler for a few years and ran a rare-book store. Eventually
mired in financial troubles, however, he followed Nancy to New York in
1805.
Da Ponte became a grocer on the Bowery and, after a serendipitous run-in
with Clement Moore (author of A Visit From St. Nicholas) in a
Broadway bookstore in 1807, started teaching privately and dealing Italian
books. He also spent time in Pennsylvania running a successful general
store, but returned to New York in 1819. Through his friendship with
Moore, Da Ponte obtained a post as Columbia's first Professor of Italian
in 1825.
Read
more about Da Ponte's final years in New York.
- Kevin Shihoten
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Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838)
Courtesy of Columbia University.
"Da Ponte was the first representative of enlightened
Europe to come to these shores. His knowledge of modern Italian culture
was his gift to the University—and the city."
David Freedberg, Director of the Italian Academy and Professor of Art,
Columbia University.
"Remembering Lorenzo Da Ponte,
Mozart’s Librettist and Columbia’s First Professor of Italian
Studies". Columbia
University Record. October 31, 2005: 3.
Italian Opera House on Leonard and Church Streets,
New York.
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