Every now and
then history seems to slip a gear and lurch forward in time-machine fashion.
How else to account for the fact that Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's collaborator
and the librettist for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni
and Cosl Fan Tutte,
wound up in New York, running a grocery store on the Bowery?
Da Ponte, the
subject of Rodney Bolts biography The Librettist of Venice, took
himself very seriously, and yet he led a life that was itself a kind of lengthy
comic opera.
To begin with,
Lorenzo Da Ponte was not his real name but, rather, that of the bishop who
baptized him in 1763. Da Ponte was born 14 years earlier as Emanuele Conegliano, and grew up as a Jew until his father, a
leather worker from Cenada, then part of the
Da Ponte seems a
faintly ridiculous ladies man. He was vain, prickly, foppish
and, by the time he was in his mid-30s, practically toothless. A jealous
rival, a physician, had given him a supposedly curative liqueur that was in
fact nitric acid and rotted his mouth. Nevertheless, women threw themselves at
him, and it was finally a flagrant affair that in 1779 caused Da Ponte to be
expelled from
The job was
mostly hackwork, but after a disastrous collaboration with Salieri,
Da Ponte began to apply himself and made a careful study of opera plots and mechanics.
He was a gifted versifier, but his real genius proved to be for shaping stories
and delineating characters. Eventually, over a decade or so, he worked with
just about everyone Salieri, Martmn y Soler, Paisello but he particularly hit it off with
Mozart.
Though Mozart was
seven years younger, the two were a lot alike not just talented but vain, insecure and
hugely ambitious and they grew so
close that while writing Don Giovanni, for example, they worked in
adjoining lodging houses and hollered back and forth through their windows.
Mozart privately believed that in opera the text should always be subservient
to the music, while Da Ponte was convinced that without his poetry even
Mozarts music would be an empty vessel, yet their collaboration was
harmonious and brilliant.
Mr. Bolt, wisely
for the most part, does not serve up a lot of musical analysis, yet one wishes
that his descriptions of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas were even more
detailed. He is particularly informative about Figaro, describing how
shrewdly Da Ponte adapted Beaumarchaiss play, but a little less so about
Don Giovanni and Cosl.
Success, however,
brought out the worst in Da Ponte, or as Mr. Bolt puts it, The dung of vilification and deceit that underlay the Viennese
opera world fertilized an unpleasant, scheming side of his character. He
thought he was a clever operator, but his political instincts were almost
always wrong, and after the death of Joseph II he so alienated the
emperors successors that he was exiled from
Da Ponte, still
nominally a priest, was married by now, to a much younger and extremely
sensible woman named Nancy Grahl, but even she was
unable to keep him from going bankrupt first in
The grocery
business was not a success, and after a stint in
Mr. Bolt,...has written... this operatic life in a somewhat operatic
style, with a weakness for metaphors that are either clichid
or, like that fertilizing dung, just plain odd. But he is judicious and well
informed, ably sorting out fact from apocrypha (much of it stemming from Da
Pontes highly unreliable memoirs), and smart enough not to burden the
story with a lot of interpretation. Its a remarkable yarn on its own, and
a reminder that the 18th century was in many ways the great age of
self-invention, when people were able to refashion themselves, like
quicksilver, over and over again.