Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte (né Emanuele Conegliano; 10 March 1749 – 17 August 1838) was an Italian and American librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790).

He was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and with Manuel Garcia, the first to introduce Italian opera to America. Aside from his relationship with Mozart, Da Ponte was also a close friend of Casanova.

Lorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano in 1749 in Ceneda, in the Republic of Venice (now Vittorio Veneto, Italy). He was Jewish by birth, the eldest of three sons. In 1764, his father, Geronimo Conegliano, then a widower, converted himself and his family to Roman Catholicism in order to marry a Catholic woman. Emanuele, as was the custom, took the name of Lorenzo Da Ponte from the bishop of Ceneda who baptised him.

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

In 1773, Da Ponte 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 dissolute life. While priest of the Church of San Luca, he took a mistress, with whom he had two children. In 1777, he met Giacomo Casanova, who became a close friend for over 20 years and was featured in his memoirs. Both were Venetian adventurers, kindred spirits, and seducers.

At Da Ponte's 1779 trial, where he was charged with "public concubinage" and "abduction of a respectable woman", it was alleged that he had been living in a brothel and organizing the entertainments there. He was found guilty and banished for fifteen years from Venice.

Da Ponte moved to Gorizia (Görz), then part of Austria, where he lived as a writer, attaching himself to the leading noblemen and cultural patrons of the city. In 1781, he believed (falsely) that he had an invitation from his friend Caterino Mazzolà, the poet of the Saxon court, to take up a post at Dresden, only to be disabused when he arrived there. Mazzolà however offered him work at the theatre translating libretti and recommended that he seek to develop writing skills. He also gave him a letter of introduction to the composer Antonio Salieri. In 1784, he met his friend Casanova once again in Vienna, and with his newly made fortune, financed him and received his counsels.

With the help of Salieri, Da Ponte applied for and obtained the post of librettist to the Italian Theatre in Vienna. Here he also found a patron in the banker Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, benefactor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whom he would meet in 1783. As court poet and librettist in Vienna, he collaborated with Mozart, Salieri and Vicente Martín y Soler.

Da Ponte wrote the libretti for Mozart's most popular Italian operas, The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790), and Soler's Una cosa rara, as well as the text on which the cantata Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia (collaboratively composed in 1785 by Salieri, Mozart and Cornetti) is based. 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 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 the case of Figaro, Da Ponte included a preface to the libretto that hints at his technique and objectives in libretto writing, as well as his close working with the composer:

I have not made a translation [of Beaumarchais], but rather an imitation, or let us say an extract. ... I was compelled to reduce the sixteen original characters to eleven, two of which can be played by a single actor and to omit, in addition to one whole act, many effective scenes. ... In spite, however, of all the zeal and care on the part of both the composer and myself to be brief, the opera will not be one of the shortest. ... Our excuse will be the variety of development of this drama, ... to paint faithfully and in full colour the divers passions that are aroused, and ... to offer a new type of spectacle. ...

Having moved to the United States in 1805, Da Ponte settled in New York City first, then Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where he briefly ran a grocery store and gave private Italian lessons while entertaining in some business activities in Philadelphia. He returned to New York to open a bookstore. He became friends with Clement Clarke Moore, and, through him, gained an unpaid 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 raised a Jew. In New York he introduced opera and produced in May 1826 the first full performance of Don Giovanni in the United States, in which Maria García (soon to marry Malibran) sang Zerlina. He also introduced Gioachino Rossini's music in the U.S., through a concert tour with his niece Giulia Da Ponte.

In 1807 he began to write his Memoirs (published in 1823), described by Charles Rosen as "not an intimate exploration of his own identity and character, but rather a picaresque adventure story." In 1828, at the age of 79, Da Ponte became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In 1833, at the age of eighty-four, he founded the first purpose-built opera theater in the United States, the Italian Opera House in New York City, on the northwest corner of Leonard and Church Streets, which was far superior to any theater the city had yet seen. 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. In 1836 the opera house became the National Theater. In 1839 the building was burned to the ground, but it was speedily rebuilt and reopened. On 29 May 1841 however, it was destroyed by fire again. Da Ponte's opera house was, however, the predecessor of the New York Academy of Music and of the New York Metropolitan Opera.

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. Records indicate that he was originally buried in a Catholic Cemetery on 11th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. That cemetery was later paved over and the remains of the people buried there were removed to Calvary Cemetery in 1909. While the exact location of his grave at Calvary is unknown, Calvary Cemetery does contain a stone marker as a memorial.

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

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

He specifically wished to create a buffa comedy opera which included a seria female part for contrast; Taruskin suggests that "Da Ponte's special gift was that of forging this virtual smorgasbord of idioms into a vivid 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 that "the verbal borrowings are few", and that Da Ponte is at every point "wittier, more stylish, more concise and more effective." Moreover, Da Ponte's restructuring of the action enables a tighter format giving better opportunities for Mozart's musical structures. David Conway suggests that Da Ponte's own life 'in disguise' (as a Jew/priest/womaniser) enabled him to infuse the operatic cliche of disguise with a sense of Romantic irony.

Frances Da Ponte married Knight commander Henry James Anderson. Their son, Maj. Elbert Ellery Anderson (1833–1903), married to Augusta Chauncey (b. 1835), granddaughter of Commodore Isaac Chauncey, and descendant of Charles Chauncy, the 2nd President of Harvard. Maj. Ellery Anderson was of the family of Founding father William Ellery, and his cousin Elbert Jefferson Anderson, was a millionaire in 1892.

Their son, Peter Chauncey Anderson, was married to Mary Yale Ogden, who was the daughter of Elias Hudson Ogden and Martha Louise Goodrich. Her grandparents were Dr. Oren Goodrich and Olivia Yale, daughter of Colonel Braddam Yale, members of the Yale and Ogden families. She was a distant relative of Edith Ogden, (the wife of Carter Harrison IV –himself a mayor of Chicago and a cousin of US President William Henry Harrison) and of Senator Aaron Ogden (governor of New Jersey).

Il ricco d'un giorno (1784) – composer Antonio Salieri

Il burbero di buon cuore (1786, from the comedy Le bourru bienfaisant by Carlo Goldoni) – composer Vicente Martín y Soler

Il finto cieco (1786, from the comedy L'Aveugle clairvoyant by Marc-Antoine Legrand) – composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga

Le nozze di Figaro (1786, from the comedy The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre Beaumarchais) – composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Il Demogorgone ovvero Il filosofo confuso (1786, from the comedy Il filosofo punito by Pietro Antonio Zaguri) – composer Vincenzo Righini