Lorenzo Da Ponte

This article is about the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. For the Bishop of the same name, see Vittorio Veneto.

Lorenzo Da Ponte
Engraving by Michele Pekenino after Nathaniel Rogers

Lorenzo Da Ponte (10 March 1749 - 17 August 1838) was a Venetian opera librettist and poet. He wrote the librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.

European career

Lorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano in Ceneda, in the Republic of Venice (now Vittorio Veneto, Italy). He was Jewish by birth. His parents were Geremia Conegliano and Rachele Pincherle. He had two brothers; Baruch (later christened Girolamo, 1752-1783) and Anania (later christened Luigi, 1754-1781). Rachele died giving birth to Anania in 1754. In 1763 the widower Geremia Conegliano converted himself and his three sons to Roman Catholicism in order to marry the seventeen-year-old Orsola Pasqua Paietta. She was only three years older than the fourteen-year-old Emanuele, who took the name of Lorenzo da Ponte from the Bishop of Ceneda who baptised him and, according to custom, gave the family his name. Thanks to the bishop, the three brothers studied at the Ceneda seminary. The bishop died in 1768, after which Lorenzo moved to the seminary at Portogruaro, where he took the Minor Orders in 1770 and became a priest in 1773. He soon moved to Venice, where he made a living as a teacher of Latin, Italian and French. Although he was a Catholic priest, the young man led a libertine and dissolute sexual life, which earned him the enmity of the clergy, as well as of several rivals and cuckolded husbands. While priest of the church of San Luca in Venice, he took a mistress, Anzoletta Bellaudi, who was married. Da Ponte delivered their first child, an event which he commented was "the kind of incident that happens every day." Reprimanded by the vicar-general, Da Ponte and Anzoletta opened a brothel. In 1779 he was charged with "public concubinage and rapito di donna onesta" (abduction of a respectable woman). Da Ponte was tried by the Inquisition and banished for fifteen years from the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia (Most Serene Republic of Venice).

Lorenzo da Ponte moved to Gorizia, then part of Austria, where he lived as a writer, attaching himself to the leading noblemen and cultural patrons of the city. In 1781 Caterino Mazzolà, the poet of the Saxon court, called him to Dresden, and taught him how to write libretti for operas. With the help of Antonio Salieri, Lorenzo da Ponte travelled to Vienna, Austria, and applied for the post of Poet to the Theatres. Emperor Joseph II reportedly asked him how many plays he had written. Da Ponte replied "None, Sire," to which the Emperor reportedly replied "Good, good! Then we shall have a virgin muse."

As court librettist in Vienna, he wrote texts in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and collaborated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri, and Vicente Martín y Soler.

Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretti for Mozart's greatest Italian operas, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790). These operas were first staged in Prague, and became instant successes. Da Ponte became known as the greatest Italian librettist of his time.

With the death of Austrian Emperor Joseph II in 1790, Da Ponte lost his patron. He received little interest from the new Emperor, Leopold. In fact, thanks to his enemies' intrigues, Da Ponte fell into disgrace with Leopold and had to leave Vienna on that account. He could not return to Venice, from which he had been banished until the end of 1794. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at the age of 35, and Lorenzo da Ponte lost his closest friend. Lorenzo da Ponte moved to Prague, where he had enjoyed his greatest success as the librettist of Mozart's Italian operas, and then in 1792 to London, where he began a new career there as an opera producer and remained there until 1805. In London, Lorenzo da Ponte was introduced to Ann Celestine Grahl (known more commonly as Nancy), a wise and practical woman twenty years younger than him, who became his wife for the latter part of his life and was the mother to da Ponte's four children: Louisa (1794), Fanny (1799), Joseph (1800), and Lorenzo (1804). Da Ponte, however, had little interest in business, and as he had done in Venice and in Vienna, got himself in trouble. He eventually found himself in debt and bankrupt. To escape his creditors, he fled to the United States in 1805 with his wife and children. Nancy's family had already settled there.

American career

In the United States, Da Ponte settled in New York first, then Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where he briefly ran a grocery store and gave private Italian lessons. He returned to New York to open a bookstore. He became friends with Clement Clarke Moore, and, through him, gained an appointment as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. He was the first Roman Catholic priest to be appointed to the faculty, and he was also the first to have been born a Jew. In New York he introduced opera and produced a performance of Don Giovanni. He also introduced Gioachino Rossini's music in the U.S., through a concert tour with his niece Giulia da Ponte.

In 1828, at the age of 79, Lorenzo da Ponte became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1833, at the age of eighty-four, he founded the first opera house in the United States, the New York Opera Company. Owing to his lack of business acumen, however, it lasted only two seasons before the company had to be disbanded and the theater sold to pay the company's debts. It was, however, the predecessor of the New York Academy of Music and of the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Lorenzo da Ponte died in 1838 in New York; an enormous funeral ceremony was held in New York's old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Some sources state that Da Ponte is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, but that cemetery did not exist before 1848. Other sources say da Ponte was buried in lower Manhattan. Calvary Cemetery does contain a stone marker to serve as a memorial to Da Ponte.

All of Da Ponte's works were adaptations of pre-existing plots, as was common among librettists of the time, with the exceptions of L'arbore di Diana with Vicente Martín y Soler, and Così fan tutte, which he began with Salieri, but completed with Mozart. However the quality of his elaboration gave them new life, in particular the Don Giovanni character, often seen in contrast with Giacomo Casanova as the archetypical libertine character.

Works

• Operas:
  • La Scuola de' gelosi (1783) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • Il ricco d'un giorno (1784) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • Il burbero di buon cuore (1786, from the play by Carlo Goldoni) — composer Vicente Martín y Soler
  • Il Demogorgone ovvero Il filosofo confuso (1786) — composer Vincenzo Righini
  • Il finto cieco (1786) — composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga
  • Le nozze di Figaro (1786, from the play by Pierre Beaumarchais) — composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • Una cosa rara (1786, from the comedy La Luna della Sierra by Luis Vélez de Guevara) — composer Vicente Martín y Soler
  • Gli equivoci (1786) — composer Stephen Storace
  • L'arbore di Diana (1787) — composer Vicente Martín y Soler
  • Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni (1787, from the opera by Giuseppe Gazzaniga) — composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • Axur, re d'Ormus (1787/88, translation of the libretto Tarare by Pierre Beaumarchais) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • Il Talismano (1788, from Carlo Goldoni) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • Il Bertoldo (1788) — composer Antonio Brunetti
  • L'Ape musicale (1789) — Pasticcio of works by various composers
  • Il Pastor fido (1789, from the pastoral by Giovanni Battista Guarini) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • La Cifra (1789) — composer Antonio Salieri
  • Così fan tutte (1789/90) — composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • La Caffettiera bizzarra (1790) — composer Joseph Weigl
  • La Capricciosa corretta (1795) — composer Vicente Martín y Soler
  • Antigona (1796) — composer Giuseppe Francesco Bianchi
  • Il consiglio imprudente (1796) — composer Giuseppe Francesco Bianchi
  • Merope (1797) — composer Giuseppe Francesco Bianchi
  • Cinna (1798) — composer Giuseppe Francesco Bianchi
  • Armida (1802) — composer Giuseppe Francesco Bianchi
  • La Grotta di Calipso (1803) — composer Peter von Winter
  • Il Trionfo dell'amor fraterno (1804) — composer Peter von Winter
  • Il Ratto di Proserpina (1804) — composer Peter von Winter
• Cantatas and Oratorios:
  • Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia (1785) — composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri and "Cornetti" (lost)
  • Il Davidde (1791) — Pasticcio from works by various composers
  • Hymn to America — composer Antonio Bagioli
• Poetry:
  • Letter of complaint in blank verse to Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor
  • 18 sonnets in commemoration of his wife (1832)

He did translations from English into Italian, and also wrote several books of elementary instruction in the Italian language. He published an autobiography, Memorie (see Bibliography), and History of the Florentine Republic and the Medici (2 vols., 1833).

Notes

In 2009 the Spanish director Carlos Saura released his Italian film Io, Don Giovanni which attempted to link Lorenzo da Ponte's life with his libretto for Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. While well made, the film's plot is a somewhat fictionalized account of Da Ponte's life.

References

• Russo, Joseph Louis. Lorenzo Da Ponte Poet and Adventurer. Columbia University studies in romance philology and literature. New York: AMS Press, 1966. googlebooks.com Accessed October 15, 2007

Bibliography

• FitzLyon, April, The Libertine Librettist (1955)
• Bolt, Rodney, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte — Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America, New York: Bloomsbury, 2006 ISBN 1-59691-118-2
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, Memorie, New York: 1823–27; English edition: Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, translated by Elizabeth Abbott, annotated by Arthur Livingstone. New York: The Orion Press, 1959. ISBN 0-306-76290-0
• Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart's Librettist, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 ISBN 0-299-17874-9
• Holden, Anthony, The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte , London: Orion Publishing Company, 2007 ISBN 0-7538-2180-X
• Hüttler, Michael (ed.): Lorenzo Da Ponte. Vienna: Böhlau, 2007 (Maske & Kothurn, 52/4) (ISBN 978-3-205-77617-8)
• Jewish Museum, Vienna (pub.), Lorenzo Da Ponte — Challenging the New World, exhibition catalogue from the Jewish Museum ISBN 978-3-7757-1748-9, ISBN 3-7757-1748-X
• Russo, Joseph Louis, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Poet and Adventurer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1922 ISBN 0-404-50632-1
• Steptoe, Anthony, Mozart–Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural and Musical Background to "Le nozze di Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "Cosi fan tutte", New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1988 ISBN 0-19-313215-X
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Libretti viennesi", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano-Parma: Fondazione Bembo-Ugo Guanda Editore, 1999, due volumi. ISBN 88-8246-060-6
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Estratto delle Memorie", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1999. ISBN 88-7050-438-7
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Il Mezenzio", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2000. ISBN 88-7050-310-0
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Saggio di traduzione libera di Gil Blas", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2002. ISBN 88-7050-461-1
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Dante Alighieri", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2004. ISBN 88-7050-462-X
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Saggi poetici", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2005. ISBN 88-7050-463-8
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Libretti londinesi" a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2007. ISBN 88-7050-464-6

External links

• Acocella, Joan, "Nights At The Opera: The Life of the Man who put Words to Mozart", The New Yorker, 8 January 2007
• Holden, Anthony, “The phoenix”, ‘’The Guardian’’ (London), 7 January 2007
• Keats, Jonathan, "Lorenzo's Toil: How the Son of an Impoverished Leatherworker Came to Write Mozart's Libretti", Washington Post, 16 July 2006 — book review
•  "Lorenzo Da Ponte". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913.