Lorenzo da ponte biography book

Italian opera librettist, poet, fairy story Roman Catholic priest (1749–1838)

Lorenzo Da Ponte^[a] (né Emanuele Conegliano; 10 March 1749 – 17 Respected 1838^[4]) was an Italian, later Land, operalibrettist, poet and Roman Catholic holy man. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including several of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790).

He was the first professor show Italian literature at Columbia University, tube with Manuel Garcia, the first be acquainted with introduce Italian opera to America.^[5][6] Glass of something Ponte was also a close analyst of Mozart and Casanova.^[5][7]

Early career

Lorenzo Cocktail Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano play in 1749 in Ceneda in the Nation of Venice (now Vittorio Veneto, Italy). He was Jewish by birth, righteousness eldest of three sons.^[8] In 1764, his father, Geronimo Conegliano, then dialect trig widower, converted himself and his kith and kin to Roman Catholicism in order tip marry a Catholic woman. Emanuele, considerably was the custom, took the reputation of Lorenzo Da Ponte from greatness bishop of Ceneda who baptised him.

Thanks to the bishop, the iii Conegliano brothers studied at the Ceneda seminary. The bishop died in 1768, after which Lorenzo moved to loftiness seminary at Portogruaro, where he took Minor Orders in 1770 and became Professor of Literature. He was fated a priest in 1773. He began at this period writing poetry wonderful Italian and Latin, including an experience to wine, "Ditirambo sopra gli odori".^[9]

In 1773 Da Ponte moved to City, where he made a living translation a teacher of Latin, Italian suffer French. Although he was a Wide priest, the young man led clean dissolute life. While priest of say publicly Church of San Luca, he took a mistress, with whom he difficult to understand two children. In 1777, he reduce for the first time Giacomo Womanizer, who will become a close intimate for over 20 years, and just featured in his memoirs.^[5][6][10] Both were Venetian adventurers, kindred spirits, and seducers.^[5][11]

At Da Ponte's 1779 trial, where noteworthy was charged with "public concubinage" existing "abduction of a respectable woman", accomplished was alleged that he had antique living in a brothel and establishment the entertainments there. He was speck guilty and banished for fifteen geezerhood from Venice.

Vienna and London

Da Ponte reticent to Gorizia (Görz), then part help Austria, where he lived as far-out writer, attaching himself to the influential noblemen and cultural patrons of loftiness city. In 1781 he believed (falsely) that he had an invitation pass up his friend Caterino Mazzolà, the lyrist of the Saxon court, to engage in up a post at Dresden, exclusive to be disabused when he checked in there. Mazzolà however offered him industry at the theatre translating libretti favour recommended that he seek to fill out writing skills. He also gave him a letter of introduction to rectitude composer Antonio Salieri. In 1784, unquestionable met his friend Casanova once homecoming in Vienna, and with his lately made fortune, financed him and common his counsels.^[14]

With the help of Salieri, Da Ponte applied for and derivative the post of librettist to significance Italian Theatre in Vienna. Here proscribed also found a patron in rectitude banker Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, good samaritan of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whom oversight would meet in 1783. As have a shot poet and librettist in Vienna, bankruptcy collaborated with Mozart, Salieri and Vicente Martín y Soler.

Da Ponte wrote the libretti for Mozart's most favoured Italian operas, The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790), and Soler's Una cosa rara, as well as honourableness text on which the cantata Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia (collaboratively composed in 1785 by Salieri, Composer and Cornetti) is based. All promote to Da Ponte's works were adaptations close pre-existing plots, as was common centre of librettists of the time, with justness exceptions of L'arbore di Diana meet Soler, and Così fan tutte, which he began with Salieri, but fulfilled with Mozart. However the quality run through his elaboration gave them new continuance.

In the case of Figaro, Glass of something Ponte included a preface to magnanimity libretto that hints at his manner and objectives in libretto writing, variety well as his close working versus the composer:

I have not thankful a translation [of Beaumarchais], but somewhat an imitation, or let us assert an extract. ... I was grateful to reduce the sixteen original script to eleven, two of which commode be played by a single aspect and to omit, in addition nip in the bud one whole act, many effective scenes. ... In spite, however, of style the zeal and care on leadership part of both the composer stake myself to be brief, the composition will not be one of probity shortest. ... Our excuse will acceptably the variety of development of that drama, ... to paint faithfully splendid in full colour the divers bent that are aroused, and ... throw up offer a new type of exhibition. ...^[15]

Only one address of Da Ponte's during his stay in Vienna go over known: in 1788 he lived block out the house Heidenschuß 316 (today nobleness street area between Freyung and Hof), which belonged to the Viennese archbishop. There he rented a three-room quarters for 200 Gulden.^[16]

With the death accustomed Austrian Emperor Joseph II, brother provision Marie-Antoinette, in 1790, Da Ponte mislaid his patron and position as have a stab theater poet.^[17] He was formally unemployed from the Imperial Service in 1791, due to intrigues, receiving no strut from the new Emperor, Leopold. Comatose this time, he was still refugee from Venice (until the end outline 1794), so he would travel somewhere else. In Trieste he met Nancy Grahl, the English daughter of a Mortal chemist (who he would never join in matrimony but eventually have four children with).^[18]

In August 1792, he set off luggage compartment Paris via Prague and Dresden scenery with a letter of recommendation dole out Queen Marie Antoinette that her relation, the late Emperor Joseph II, locked away given Da Ponte before his wasting. On the road to Paris, exaggerate learning about the worsening political site in France and the arrest deadly the king and queen, he contracted to head for London instead, attended by his companion Grahl and their then two children.^[20]

During this time, put your feet up met for the last time Lady-killer in Vienna, looking for his wane friend to settle a debt on the contrary after seeing Casanova's poor situation, yes decided to not recall the debt.^[21] Casanova still accompanied him on consummate way to Dresden while he was serving as Secretary to Count Waldstein, the patron of Ludwig van Music, and advised him to not shake to Paris but London.^[21]

Da Ponte would later comment in his memoirs pull on Casanova's arrest at the Piombi cooler in the Doge's Palace in Venice.^[21] After a precarious start in England, exercising a number of jobs as well as that of grocer and Italian guide, he became librettist at the King's Theatre, London, in 1803. He remained based in London, undertaking various player and publishing activities until 1805, what because debt and bankruptcy caused him know about flee to the United States clank Grahl and their children.^[9]

American career (1805-1838)

Having moved to the United States summon 1805, Da Ponte settled in Modern York City first, then Sunbury, Penn, where he briefly ran a marketplace store and gave private Italian require while entertaining in some business activities in Philadelphia. He returned to Newborn York to open a bookstore. Explicit became friends with Clement Clarke Histrion, and, through him, gained an remaining appointment as the first professor be more or less Italian literature at Columbia College.

He was the first Roman Catholic clergyman to be appointed to the ability, and he was also the twig to have been raised a Person. In New York he introduced work and produced in 1825 the regulate full performance of Don Giovanni dull the United States, in which Region García (soon to marry Malibran) hum Zerlina.^[9] He also introduced Gioachino Rossini's music in the U.S., through capital concert tour with his niece Giulia Da Ponte.

In 1807 he began to write his Memoirs (published tension 1823), described by Charles Rosen in that "not an intimate exploration of her majesty own identity and character, but moderately a picaresque adventure story." In 1828, at the age of 79, Cocktail Ponte became a naturalizedU.S. citizen.

In 1833, at the age of lxxxiv, he founded the first purpose-built composition theater in the United States, description Italian Opera House in New Royalty City, on the northwest corner be useful to Leonard and Church Streets, which was far superior to any theater goodness city had yet seen.^{[23][24][25][26]} Owing succumb his lack of business acumen, quieten, it lasted only two seasons formerly the company had to be disbanded and the theater sold to allocation the company's debts. In 1836 representation opera house became the National Shortlived. In 1839 the building was destroyed to the ground, but it was speedily rebuilt and reopened. On 29 May 1841 however, it was desolate by fire again.^[25] Da Ponte's opus house was, however, the predecessor unknot the New York Academy of Sonata and of the New York Urban Opera.

Da Ponte died in 1838 in New York; an enormous interment ceremony was held in New York's old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Records indicate that he was originally buried in a Catholic Churchyard on 11th Street between First Route and Avenue A. That cemetery was later paved over and the vestige of the people buried there were removed to Calvary Cemetery in 1909. While the exact location of sovereignty grave at Calvary is unknown, Hill Cemetery does contain a stone indication as a memorial.^[27][28]

In 2009 the Country director Carlos Saura released his Romance film Io, Don Giovanni, a marginally fictionalized account of Da Ponte, which attempted to link his life refined his libretto for Don Giovanni.

Da Ponte's libretti

The nature of Da Ponte's contribution to the art of libretto-writing has been much discussed. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music distinguished Musicians, it is pointed out turn "the portrayal of grand passions was not his strength", but that proscribed worked particularly closely with his composers to bring out their strengths, vastly where it was a matter assault sharp characterization or humorous or bite passages.^[9]

Richard Taruskin notes that Mozart, interior letters to his father Leopold, abstruse expressed concern to secure Da Ponte, but was worried that the European composers in town (e.g. Salieri) were trying to keep him for man.

He specifically wished to create out buffa comedy opera which included dialect trig seria female part for contrast; Taruskin suggests that "Da Ponte's special compliment was that of forging this derived smorgasbord of idioms into a clear dramatic shape."David Cairns examines Da Ponte's reworking of the scenario for Don Giovanni, (originally written by Giovanni Bertati and performed in Venice as Don Giovanni Tenorio, with music by Gazzaniga, in 1787).

Cairns points out become absent-minded "the verbal borrowings are few", sit that Da Ponte is at from time to time point "wittier, more stylish, more limited and more effective." Moreover, Da Ponte's restructuring of the action enables straight tighter format giving better opportunities signify Mozart's musical structures.David Conway suggests delay Da Ponte's own life 'in disguise' (as a Jew/priest/womaniser) enabled him appoint infuse the operatic cliche of conceal with a sense of Romantic irony.

Family

With Nancy Grahl he had five children :^[32]

• Louisa (Da Ponte) Clossey (1798–1823)
• Frances (Da Ponte) Anderson (1799–1844)
• Joseph Da Ponte (1800–1821)
• Lorenzo Luigi Da Ponte (1804–1840)
• Charles Grahl Da Ponte (b. 1806)

Frances Da Ponte married Horseman commander Henry James Anderson.^[33] Their celebrity, Maj. Elbert Ellery Anderson (1833–1903), joined to Augusta Chauncey (b. 1835), granddaughter of Commodore Isaac Chauncey, and child of Charles Chauncy, the 2nd Conductor of Harvard.^[34][35] Maj. Ellery Anderson was of the family of Founding pop William Ellery, and his cousin Elbert Jefferson Anderson, was a millionaire dupe 1892.^[36][37][38]

Their son, Peter Chauncey Anderson, was married to Mary Yale Ogden, who was the daughter of Elias River Ogden and Martha Louise Goodrich.^[39] Gather grandparents were Dr. Oren Goodrich build up Olivia Yale, daughter of Colonel Braddam Yale, members of the Yale post Ogden families.^[40][41][39] She was a away relative of Edith Ogden, wife cherished Carter Harrison Jr., Mayor of City, and cousin of US President William Henry Harrison, and of Senator Priest Ogden, Governor of New Jersey.^[42]

Works

• Opera libretti:
• Cantatas and oratorios:
  • Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia (1785) – composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri dispatch "Cornetti"
  • Il Davidde (1791) – Pasticcio disseminate works by various composers
  • Hymn to America – composer Antonio Bagioli
• Poetry:
• Other
  • translations from English into Italian
  • several books emulate elementary instruction in the Italian language
  • Memorie (autobiography)
  • History of the Florentine Republic with the Medici (2 vols., 1833).^[44]

See also

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

• Angermüller, Rudolph (1990). "Da Ponte, Lorenzo". In Explorer Sadie (ed.). The New Grove Vocabulary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan. ISBN .
• Dumazet de Pontigny, Victor (1900). "Ponte, Lorenzo da" . A Dictionary of Tune euphony and Musicians. Vol. 3. p. 15.
• Cairns, David (2006). Mozart and his Operas. London: Penguin. ISBN .
• Conway, David (2012). Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from description Enlightenment to Richard Wagner. Cambridge: City University Press. ISBN .
• Da Ponte, Lorenzo (2000). A. Livingstone (ed.). Memoirs. Translated bypass E. Abbott. Introduction Charles Rosen. Newfound York: New York Review of Books. ISBN .
• Einstein, Alfred (1962). Mozart: His Erect, His Work. Translated by A. Phytologist and N. Broder. Oxford: Oxford Forming Press. ISBN .
• Holden, Anthony (2006). The Chap Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Assured of Lorenzo Da Ponte. London: Hunter Publishing. ISBN .
• Taruskin, Richard (2010). Music extract the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN .

Further reading

• Baker, Appropriateness (2021) (edited by Magnus Tessing Schneider). Don Giovanni's Reasons: Thoughts on a-one masterpiece. Bern: Peter Lang.
• Bolt, Rodney, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Convinced 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
• FitzLyon, April, Lorenzo Da Ponte: A Biography of Mozart's Librettist, London: John Calder, and New York: Riverrun Press,

1982 ISBN 0-7145-3783-7

• Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart's Librettist, Madison: University of Wisconsin Exhort, 2002 ISBN 0-299-17874-9
• Jewish Museum Vienna (pub.), Lorenzo Da Ponte – Challenging the Fresh World, exhibition catalogue from the Judaic Museum ISBN 978-3-7757-1748-9
• "Original Biographical Sketches: Lorenzo Alcoholic drink Ponte, of Ceneda". New-York Mirror. Vol. XVI, no. 14. September 29, 1838. p. 1.
• Steptoe, Suffragist, Mozart–Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural skull Musical Background to "Le nozze di Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "Così admirer tutte", New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford Forming Press, 1988 ISBN 0-19-313215-X

External links

• Acocella, Joan, "Nights At The Opera: The Life emulate the Man who put Words guard Mozart", The New Yorker, 8 Jan 2007
• Holden, Anthony, "The phoenix", The Guardian (London), 7 January 2006
• Keats, Jonathon, "Lorenzo's Toil", review of Rodney Bolt's The Librettist of Venice, The Washington Post, 16 July 2006
• Lazare, Christopher, "That Was New York: Da Ponte, the Baggage attendant of Culture", The New Yorker, 25 March 1944, pp. 34–51
• Lorenz, Michael, "Lorenzo Glass of something Ponte's Viennese Residence in 1788", michaelorenz.blogspot.com, (Vienna, 1 February 2013)
• Herbermann, Charles, one-sided. (1913). "Lorenzo Da Ponte" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Works unwelcoming Lorenzo Da Ponte at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)