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The Librettist of Venice
Rodney Bolt
The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo da Ponte Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America
Bloomsbury Publishing
July 2006
Featuring: Casanova; Lorenzo Da Ponte
448 pages
ISBN: 1596911182
EAN: 9781596911185
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The operatic life of the librettist for Don
Giovanni and The Marriage of
Figaro.
In 1805, Lorenzo Da Ponte was the
proprietor of a small grocery store in New York. But since
his birth into an Italian Jewish family in 1749, he had
already been a priest, a poet, the lover of many women, a
scandalous Enlightenment thinker banned from teaching in
Venice, the librettist for three of Mozart’s most sublime
operas, a collaborator with Salieri, a friend of Casanova,
and a favorite of Emperor Joseph II. He would go on to
establish New York City’s first opera house and be the first
professor of Italian at Columbia University. An inspired
innovator but a hopeless businessman, who loved with
wholehearted loyalty and recklessness, Da Ponte was one of
the early immigrants to live out the American
dream.
In Rodney Bolt’s rollicking and extensively
researched biography, Da Ponte’s picaresque life
takes readers from Old World courts and the back streets
of Venice, Vienna, and London to the New World promise of
New York City. Two hundred and fifty years after Mozart’s
birth, the life and legacy of his librettist Da Ponte are as
astonishing as ever.
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