Among the world’s favorite operas, we find three of them with libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and music by none other than the astonishingly charming Viennese pastry chef Mozart. The list is a delight in itself: The weddings of Figaro, Don Giovann and Così Fan Tutte.
We learn in Rodney Bolt’s new book, The Librettist of Venice, that Da Ponte became so close to the unrivaled Mozart – both, as we know, were not only talented but vain, insecure and ambitious – that while writing Don Giovanni, they worked at homes. adjoining fields and shouted at each other through their windows.
Da Ponte even dared to compete with Mozart, who believed that the text should be subordinate to the music, while Da Ponte was sure that the words should be primary, in fact, that without his poetry even the music of Mighty Mo would not. it would be nothing.
However, how Da Ponte fell from the heights. As hard as it is to imagine, he ended up in New York, at the same time running a grocery store on the Bowery.
Brilliant as an artist, he was apparently, in his personal life, a managerial idiot. Now, put another way, as talent flies, practical reason just lumbers ahead, like a relative idiot.
Da Ponte, a Jew by birth, was ordained a priest as a result of his father’s decision to have the family become Catholic through the servitude of a life of commerce. But his true calling was married women. We know that his exploits rivaled Casanova, who became his friend and, if we believe such a thing is possible in the category at hand, his mentor.
Da Ponte himself admitted a deficiency compared to his rival for insincere relationships: He did not have Casanova’s supposed talent for fleecing women he falsely wooed. In fact, Da Ponte claims that he actually loved the people he kissed with.
He also considered himself politically savvy, but his moves were disastrous. He so upset the successors of Joseph II that he was exiled from Vienna.
Now technically still a priest, he was married to a younger but wiser and more practical woman named Nancy Grahl, but even she couldn’t keep the man out of bankruptcy in London and again in America, where they moved in 1805, because his family had settled here.
He tried to establish Italian opera companies when the English-speaking public had little interest in them. To add onions to the opera, the grocery business failed.
Eventually he became a teacher, bookseller, and aspiring entrepreneur.
On the positive side, New York turned out to be the most pleasant place for him. He was relatively liberal and Da Ponte became a darling of the cultural elite.
He became the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. While the position was quite ceremonial, Da Ponte has the double distinction of having been the first Jew and the first priest of the school’s faculty.
He lived into the 80s, revered but considered eccentric.
He was a charming man who made the profession of European when such status was still considered novel.
Yet when one compares his everyday activities to his winged collaboration with Mozart, one can only shake his head in acknowledging how brilliant the remarkable syntheses of talent are, so high up in the mental processes that we can only hope that they yield answers to our consciousness. expectant. , compared to the “first we do this and then we do that” of the practical but still invaluable mind.