Lorenzo Da Ponte

• 1. Introduction

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  Lorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on the 10th of March 1749, the Jewish eldest son of a widower in Ceneda, a small town in the Republic of Venice. By the time he died in New York City on the 17th of August 1838, he had reinvented himself so many times that even his name was borrowed from a bishop. He had been a seminary student, a Catholic priest, a convicted libertine, an exile, a grocer, a bookseller, and a professor. Along the way, he also wrote the words for three of the most performed operas in history.

  The questions his life raises are hard to shake. How does a man banned from his homeland for fifteen years end up shaping the canon of Western music? How does a Jewish-born priest become the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College? And what does it mean that his closest friend for more than two decades was Giacomo Casanova?

• 2. A New Name, A New Life

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  In 1764, Geronimo Conegliano, a widower in Ceneda, converted himself and his three sons from Judaism to Roman Catholicism so that he could marry a Catholic woman. The eldest son, Emanuele, was baptised by the bishop of Ceneda and took the bishop's own name: Lorenzo Da Ponte. The bishop arranged for all three brothers to study at the seminary in Ceneda, and when the bishop died in 1768, Lorenzo moved to the seminary at Portogruaro.

  At Portogruaro he took Minor Orders in 1770 and was appointed Professor of Literature. He was ordained a priest in 1773, the same year he moved to Venice. Even at that early stage, his interests ran wider than theology. He was already writing poetry in Italian and Latin, including a composition he titled "Ditirambo sopra gli odori," an ode to wine.

  In Venice he earned his living teaching Latin, Italian, and French. He was, by every account, a poor fit for priestly life. While serving the Church of San Luca, he took a mistress and had two children with her. In 1777 he met Giacomo Casanova, a fellow Venetian adventurer, and they became close friends for more than twenty years. The friendship was almost structural: both men were seducers who moved through aristocratic Europe on charm and wit alone.

  The reckoning came in 1779. At trial, Da Ponte faced charges of public concubinage and the abduction of a respectable woman. The court found him guilty and banished him from Venice for fifteen years. That sentence, humiliating as it was, turned out to be the condition that made his greatest work possible.

• 3. Vienna and the Mozart Years

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  Da Ponte arrived in Gorizia, then part of Austria, and attached himself to the noblemen and cultural patrons of the city. In 1781, he was lured toward Dresden by the belief that his friend Caterino Mazzola, poet of the Saxon court, had arranged him a position there. The invitation turned out to be a misunderstanding. Mazzola still helped him, giving him translation work at the theatre and, crucially, a letter of introduction to the composer Antonio Salieri.

  With Salieri's backing, Da Ponte obtained the post of librettist to the Italian Theatre in Vienna. He also found a patron in the banker Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, who was already a benefactor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Da Ponte met Mozart in 1783. The collaboration that followed produced three works that have never left the repertoire: The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, and Cosi fan tutte in 1790.

  Mozart was deliberate about wanting Da Ponte. The musicologist Richard Taruskin notes that Mozart, writing to his father Leopold, expressed real concern about securing Da Ponte and worried that Italian composers in Vienna, including Salieri, were trying to keep the librettist for themselves. Mozart had a specific artistic goal: a buffa comedy opera that would include a serious female role for contrast. Taruskin describes Da Ponte's particular gift as the ability to forge a wide range of idioms into a vivid dramatic shape.

  For Figaro, Da Ponte adapted the controversial comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, and he wrote a preface explaining his method in terms that are unusually candid for the period. He wrote that he had made not a translation but an imitation, that he had reduced the sixteen original characters to eleven, omitted one entire act and many effective scenes, and aimed to offer, in his words, "a new type of spectacle." He described working closely with Mozart at every stage.

  In 1788, the only documented address from his Vienna years places him at the house Heidenschuss 316, an apartment of three rooms belonging to the Viennese archbishop, for which he paid 200 Gulden in rent. When Emperor Joseph II died in 1790, Da Ponte lost his position as court theatre poet. He was formally dismissed from Imperial Service in 1791, his enemies' intrigues having found no resistance in the new Emperor Leopold.

• 4. Exile, Casanova, and London

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  Dismissed from Vienna and still legally barred from Venice until the end of 1794, Da Ponte found himself in Trieste, where he met Nancy Grahl, the English daughter of a Jewish chemist. He never married her, but she would travel with him across Europe and eventually to America, and they would have four children together.

  In August 1792, Da Ponte set out for Paris carrying a letter of recommendation to Queen Marie Antoinette, written by her brother, the late Emperor Joseph II, before his death. On the road, he learned of the worsening political situation in France and the arrests of the king and queen. He turned toward London instead, bringing Grahl and their two children with him.

  Casanova entered this moment in a memorable way. Da Ponte encountered his old friend in Vienna during this period, intending to collect a debt. He saw that Casanova was in poor circumstances and chose not to pursue the money. Casanova, who was then serving as secretary to Count Waldstein, the patron of Ludwig van Beethoven, accompanied Da Ponte partway to Dresden and counselled him to avoid Paris entirely and head for London. Da Ponte later wrote about Casanova's earlier imprisonment at the Piombi prison in the Doge's Palace in Venice, one of many episodes Casanova had survived by cunning.

  England proved difficult. Da Ponte worked as a grocer and as an Italian teacher before securing the position of librettist at the King's Theatre in London in 1803. He stayed through 1805, when accumulating debt and eventual bankruptcy forced him to leave. He fled to the United States with Grahl and their children, carrying with him the skills of a man who had written libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers.

• 5. America's First Opera Champion

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  Da Ponte arrived in New York in 1805. He tried Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where he ran a grocery store and gave private Italian lessons while maintaining some business activities in Philadelphia. He returned to New York, opened a bookstore, and eventually made his way into the city's small but ambitious cultural world.

  His friendship with Clement Clarke Moore proved decisive. Through Moore, Da Ponte received an unpaid appointment as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. The position carried a distinction that went largely unacknowledged at the time: he was the first Roman Catholic priest appointed to the Columbia faculty, and also the first person in that role to have been raised as a Jew.

  In May 1826, Da Ponte produced the first full performance of Don Giovanni in the United States. Maria Garcia, who would soon marry and become known as Malibran, sang the role of Zerlina. He also brought Gioachino Rossini's music to American audiences through a concert tour featuring his niece Giulia Da Ponte. These were not incidental acts of cultural promotion. Da Ponte, along with the impresario Manuel Garcia, is credited as one of the first people to introduce Italian opera to America at all.

  In 1833, at the age of eighty-four, he founded what the source describes as the first purpose-built opera theater in the United States: the Italian Opera House, sited on the northwest corner of Leonard and Church Streets in New York City. The building was described as far superior to any theater the city had previously seen. The enterprise did not survive his approach to money. Within two seasons, debts forced the company to disband and the theater to be sold. In 1836 the building became the National Theater. It burned in 1839, was rebuilt, and burned again on the 29th of May 1841. The Italian Opera House is nonetheless remembered as a predecessor of both the New York Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera.

  In 1828, at the age of seventy-nine, Da Ponte became a naturalized United States citizen. He had started writing his Memoirs in 1807; they were published in 1823. The musicologist Charles Rosen described them as not an intimate exploration of character but rather a picaresque adventure story, which given the life they recorded, seems entirely apt.

• 6. The Art of the Libretto

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  The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians makes a pointed observation about Da Ponte's strengths: the portrayal of grand passions was not his forte, but he worked unusually closely with his composers to amplify what each of them did best, particularly in sharp characterization and humorous or satirical passages.

  The clearest case is Don Giovanni. The scholar David Cairns examined Da Ponte's reworking of the scenario that Giovanni Bertati had originally written and that had been performed in Venice as Don Giovanni Tenorio, with music by Gazzaniga, in 1787. Cairns found that while verbal borrowings between Da Ponte and Bertati were few, Da Ponte was at every point wittier, more stylish, more concise, and more effective. He also restructured the action so that Mozart's musical forms had tighter and better opportunities to do their work.

  The scholar David Conway offers a more personal reading of Da Ponte's contribution. Conway argues that Da Ponte's own life spent in disguise as a Jew who became a Catholic, a priest who lived as a libertine, a Venetian who passed as a European cosmopolitan gave him an instinctive feel for the operatic convention of disguise. Conway suggests that Da Ponte infused that convention with a sense of Romantic irony rooted in genuine experience rather than artistic invention.

  All of Da Ponte's libretti were adaptations of existing sources, a common practice among librettists of his era, with two exceptions: L'arbore di Diana, written with Vicente Martin y Soler, and Cosi fan tutte, which he began developing with Salieri before completing it with Mozart. In 2009, the Spanish director Carlos Saura released the Italian film Io, Don Giovanni, a partly fictionalized account of Da Ponte's life that tried to draw a direct line between the life he lived and the opera he wrote. Whether or not that line is exact, the fact that it was still being drawn more than a century and a half after his death suggests how deeply the two are intertwined.