Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte (
March 10 1749–
August 17 1838) was an Italian
librettist born in
Ceneda (now
Vittorio Veneto). He is most famous for having written the librettos to three
Mozart operas,
Le nozze di Figaro (
The Marriage of Figaro),
Don Giovanni (he was a friend of
Casanova), and
Così fan tutte. Many of his works were in the genre of
Opera buffa.
Da Ponte was the son of a converted Jew, and trained for the
priesthood and to be a teacher. However, he was unable to behave in a manner befitting a priest or teacher, and so he was banned from teaching, and later exiled from
Venice. Da Ponte worked in
Dresden, and later
Vienna, where he worked with
Antonio Salieri. He became the court poet for
Joseph II, in which capacity he worked in many languages, including
French,
German, and
Italian. While in Vienna he also worked with the composer
Vicente Martín y Soler.
Da Ponte later worked in
Paris,
London, and eventually moved to
New York City, where he opened a grocery store, moved to Philadelphia to run a grocery store, and then returned to NYC to run another. He became friends with
Clement Clarke Moore, the supposed author of "
Twas the Night Before Christmas", and through him gained an appointment as the first Professor of Italian Literature at
Columbia College. He was the first faculty memeber to have been born a Jew, and the first to have been ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.
Da Ponte's works were generally based on pre-existing plots, which was common at the time.
Le nozze di Figaro, for example, was based on a
Pierre Beaumarchais play, as was
Axur re d'Ormus which he wrote for Salieri.
Tim Carter and Dorothea Link. "Lorenzo Da Ponte",
Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed
May 23 2006),
grovemusic.com.
