Lorenzo Da Ponte, Librettist for three Mozart Operas.

What a life!.

This man did so many things, became so many things, and said so many things, both true and untrue! Where to begin? Poet, polyglot, orator, charmer of women, scholar, impresario; and, as one scholar described him, a ‘professional insolvent.’

In my book, Da Ponte is hugely important as a particularly inept intriguer, and as a surprisingly sentimental lover. He is not involved in the action much, because I stuck him in jail for most of the story. Da Ponte was never in jail. But he could have been.

I am going to tell you some his story in reverse order, since he spent the better part (in both senses) of his life in America. He arrived on our shores in 1805, fleeing with his new wife from his creditors in London; just one of the many major European cities from which he was forced to decamp.

In America he labored for a brief time as a greengrocer, then as a  bookseller, and an Italian tutor. He was ‘discovered’ by Clement Clark Moore (of “T’was the Night Before Christmas” fame) and became a literary lion in New York society. He was the founder of the Italian department at Columbia, also an impresario who brought the brightest European stars (Malibran! García!) to New York, and who built America’s first real Opera House in 1833, when he was 89 years of age.

Occasionally, stories of his shady sexual and financial past drifted across the Atlantic, but these sordid tales from decadent Europe did not seem to bother his American friends and students very much. They loved him.

Da Ponte, equally in love with his new country, made a fresh start, giving up his libertine ways, settling down with his adored wife Nancy and producing a quartet of charming and talented children.  His financial woes followed him, however, to the end of his days. He died in 1838, and his funeral overflowed with mourners. And creditors.

In 1783 Da Ponte arrived in Vienna after a peripatetic failed job search, with nothing but a letter of introduction to the composer Salieri. He wangled that letter into the job of Imperial Poet to the Court of Joseph II, who, as Da Ponte brags in my book “Adores me!” This was probably true.

He wangled a patron also, the building magnate Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, who was also a patron of Mozart. In his memoirs Da Ponte claims that Mozart begged him for a libretto. In my book Da Ponte does the begging. It seemed more of a likely story to me. However the collaboration began, it produced three sublime operas. Da Ponte was banished from Vienna in 1790.

In 1773, Da Ponte, who was Jewish, was ordained as a Catholic priest.He lived, purportedly, in a Venetian brothel, with another ladyfriend, and had two children by her.  Accused of organizing all sorts of entertainments in the brothel, he was tried on morals charges and banished from Venice in 1779.

In 1749, a gifted child, Emanuel Conegliano was born in Ceneda in the Republic of Venice.  He attended the Ceneda seminary, and was baptized Lorenzo Da Ponte by the presiding Bishop. He taught at the Seminary before moving to the city of Venice and beginning his life of dissipation bad business deals, immortal librettos and American successes.