January 27, 2006
Mozart in America . . . or the Next Best Thing Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 07:15 AM EST Today is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday. That may not be the anniversary to make the most of on AmericanHeritage.com—but remember Lorenzo da Ponte. Lorenzo da Ponte was the librettist—meaning he wrote the book and lyrics—for Mozart’s three surpassingly great Italian operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. He was born a Jew, ordained a Catholic priest, a poet, an adventurer, and notorious as a womanizer. In fact, he was not only a famous libertine in his own right but a good friend of Giacomo Casanova, which made him uniquely qualified to write the libretto for Don Giovanni, the tale of the downfall of Don Juan. He was also a greengrocer and deliveryman in America. In 1805, when he was 56 (and 14 years after Mozart’s death), da Ponte fled his European creditors by boarding a ship to the United States, where he had already sent his wife and children. Finding in New York a city with no opera and almost no literary community, he set up as a grocer, first in New York and then in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. After a while he started what he called the Academy for Young Gentlemen, to give lessons in Italian and other languages. In 1811 he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside to be near his in-laws. The once glamorous ex-Venetian had a hard time figuring out what to do with himself. He became a grocer again; he opened a millinery store in Philadelphia; he started a distillery; he drove a delivery truck. By 1819 he was back in New York. With his wife, he opened Ann da Ponte’s Boarding House. In 1823 he began publishing his memoirs, letting people who had seen him driving a truck or selling vegetables know that he had once been things like Poet to the Imperial Theatres in Vienna and a friend of the emperor’s. In 1825—he was 76—he became the first professor of Italian at Columbia College. In 1826 he got to see his immortal creation Don Giovanni performed in America for the first time. In 1833 he spearheaded an effort to build a house for Italian opera in New York; it opened that November, with him as co-manager. The opera house did not prosper. In 1835 da Ponte wrote, “I, the creator of the Italian language in America, the teacher of more than two thousand persons whose progress astounded Italy! I, the poet of Joseph II, the author of thirty-six dramas, the inspiration of Salieri, of Weigl, of Martin, of Winter, and Mozart! After twenty-seven years of hard labor, I have no longer a pupil! Nearly ninety years old, I have no more bread in America!” In August 1838 he died, 89 and sharp as a tack until his very last days.
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