Lorenzo Da Ponte

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Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart's Librettist

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SOURCE: "Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart's Librettist," in History Today, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, March, 1978, pp. 161-70.

[In the following excerpt, Bakshian surveys Da Ponte's career.]

On June 4th, 1805, the Transatlantic packet Columbia, fifty-seven days out of London, cast anchor in the harbour of Philadelphia. Included in the otherwise routine cargo of the Columbia was a distinguished if slightly threadbare Italian gentleman in his late middle years. Tall, with aquiline features and an oddly distinctive gait, half strut, half shuffle, with shoulders thrown back and chest thrust out, 'Signor Da Ponte' spoke fluent if heavily accented English with a slight lisp. When not speaking, his tight-lipped, feline smile concealed the fact that he was completely toothless. Like so much else connected with this newest immigrant to America, even the loss of his teeth had come about in a novel way—the result, according to their former owner, of poison administered by a jealous rival during one of his many love affairs in Vienna where he had briefly flourished as a Habsburg court poet.

The port official who examined Signor Da Ponte's meagre customs declaration (a violin, a tea urn, a carpet, a trunk of books and 'one box of fiddle strings and suspenders') can scarcely have suspected that this scanty inventory was all that remained of the European career and fortune of Mozart's greatest librettist, the artist who created the poetic and theatrical backdrops for the master's Marriage of Figaro, Così Fan Tutte and the work that many musicologists still consider the perfect opera, Don Giovanni. . . .

It was hardly an auspicious beginning; yet, at the age of fifty-six, Lorenzo Da Ponte, former Venetian Jew, renegade Catholic Priest, Viennese poet and English impresario, was about to launch a new career in the new world—a peripatetic and occasionally star-crossed thirty-three years which would see him become, among other things, a grocer, a distiller, a memoirist and one of the most important pioneers of Italian linguistic and literary studies in American academic life.

Da Ponte's memoirs alone, which some critics have compared favourably with those of his old friend and occasional fellow-swindler, Giacomo Casanova, entitle him to more lasting fame than has fallen his lot; but, even if he had died on the voyage to Philadelphia, his work as the most inspired (though strictly businesslike) collaborator of Mozart would have guaranteed him his permanent niche in the history of opera.

The preface to the posthumous 1860 Paris edition of Da Ponte's memoirs sums up both the character of the man and his opus with typical Gallic verve and contempt for foreign orthography:

Here are the most original and anecdotal artistic Italian memoirs ever to be offered to a curious public. The memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini are neither more naif nor more amusing. In his memoirs, D'Aponte (sic) is as much of a writer as his compatriot Goldoni, as frivolously amusing as the Count de Grammont, as adventurous as Gil Blas, as droll as Figaro and as hapless as Gilbert.

All of which was, to a remarkable degree, true. . . .

[Da Ponte had arrived in Venice] in early 1782, just in time to have a private interview with Pietro Metastasio, the venerable Imperial Laureate. According to Lorenzo, the aged Laureate was enchanted with some of his verse, and we will have to take his word for it since no one else was present at the interview and Metastasio died shortly afterwards. He also met Salieri who expressed interest in collaborating with Da Ponte on an opera.

But by far the most important acquaintance Da Ponte made at this time was the Emperor Joseph himself. Perhaps the most intelligent of all the Habsburgs, Joseph was a genuine intellectual with a well-developed artistic sense, and an enthusiastic love of music. Without the eccentricity of a Ludwig of Bavaria or the egomania of a Louis XIV, he was the ideal patron for a clever, gifted artist like Da Ponte. Emperor and poet seem to have hit it off immediately; even allowing for exaggeration on Da Ponte's part, it is a fact that so long as Joseph lived, Lorenzo was a significant figure in the artistic life of Vienna, and, soon after Joseph's death, the combination of jealous rivals, resentful court officials and his own excesses drove him from Vienna in eclipse. Da Ponte describes his first interview with the Emperor. He had never spoken to a monarch before, 'the cheery expression of his face, his suaveness of intonation, and above all the utter simplicity of his manner and his dress . . . not only restored my self-possession, but left me hardly aware that I was standing before an Emperor'. After a lengthy, pleasant conversation in which Joseph took his measure, he asked Da Ponte how many plays he had written:

'None, Sire.'

'Splendid! Splendid!' the Emperor replied smiling. 'We shall have a virgin muse.'

The initial result was Rich for a Day, a hastily-composed comic opera by Salieri with a hastily-written libretto by Da Ponte. It was neither quite a success nor quite a disgrace, and from it Lorenzo learned the crucial lesson that,

. . . it was not enough to be a great poet to write a good play; that no end of tricks had to be learned—the actors, for instance, had to be studied individually so that their parts might fit; that one had to note the mistakes of others and one's own, and after two or three thousand booings, find some way to correct them. . . .

While Da Ponte studied and struggled to master the verbal side of opera, his future collaborator in greatness, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was contending with musical problems of his own. Although his German-language comic opera Entführung aus dem Serail had already been produced in Vienna with modest success in July 1782, Mozart still had to contend with the rivalry of other opera composers (including the officially-placed Salieri), and the Emperor's stubborn conviction that, while Mozart was a great composer of instrumental music, he was not cut out for the operatic genre ('Too fine for our ears, and an immense number of notes, my dear Mozart,' Joseph had commented after attending a performance of Entführung).

Thus it happened that the most brilliant composer of his generation and the ablest librettist of the time were thrown together by chance—because, ironically, both of them had time on their hands in the musical capital of the world. Mozart and Da Ponte met and agreed that an ideal vehicle for collaboration existed in the form of Caron de Beaumarchais' recent French comedy, The Marriage of Figaro. They were eager to work together, but liiere was a catch; the Emperor, very enlightened but even more despotic, had recently banned performance of the Beaumarchais play in Vienna as politically sensitive, with its thinly veiled attack on hereditary privilege. Mozart was convinced that Joseph would never consent to an operatic version of the banned play.

Da Ponte, who had a good deal of the fixer in his nature, was more sanguine. In the Spring of 1786 he convinced Mozart to join with him in creating an opera 'on speculation'—a tribute not only to Da Ponte's ability to inspire confidence as a librettist, but also to his plausibility as a salesman. In approximately two months of concentrated hard work (as usual, Lorenzo exaggerates, claiming in his memoirs that the work was done in six weeks) the manuscript was ready, and Da Ponte, going directly to the Emperor, made his pitch. When Joseph objected that he had already banned the Beaumarchais comedy, Da Ponte had an answer for him,

. . . as I was writing a play to be set to music, and not a comedy, I have had to leave out many scenes and shorten many others, and I have eliminated whatever might offend the refinement and decorum of an entertainment at which Your Majesty presides. And as for the music, as far as I can judge, it is extraordinarily fine.

A copy of the score was then sent up to the palace, and Joseph, himself proficient at the harpsichord and cello, and quite a credible bass singer, immediately recognized the merit of the music. The opera was approved. Da Ponte's poetic gift had given Mozart a fine libretto; his diplomatic prowess saw it through to a performance. Figaro was such an enormous success that, as Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor who sang the roles of Don Curzio and Don Basilio, recalled in his own memoirs, 'at the end, I thought the audience would never have done applauding and calling for Mozart. Almost every piece was encored, which prolonged it nearly to the length of two operas, and induced the Emperor to issue an order on the second representation, that no piece of music should be encored.'

Mozart was well-launched as a master opera composer and Da Ponte as a master librettist. The reaction in Prague, the second city of the Habsburg realm, was even more enthusiastic, and when Mozart visited there at the beginning of 1787 he could write elatedly that, 'Here they talk of nothing else but—Figaro! The play, they sing, they whistle nothing but—Figaro!'

In his memoirs, Da Ponte himself is curiously modest about his role in the creation of the opera—but for essentially conceited reasons. His entire book is based on the assumption that everything about Da Ponte is interesting—not just the fact that on several occasions he happened to work with Mozart. Thus he dismisses his share of the triumph with acknowledgement that 'The libretto, too, was said to be beautiful. . . . '

But the triumph, however lightly he might shrug it off, led to further collaboration, and the greatest operatic achievement of Da Ponte's life—the libretto to Don Giovanni. Having agreed on the 'Don Juan' theme and informed the Emperor, Da Ponte went to work. His modus operandi had a distinctly Da Pontian flavour:

I sat down at my table and did not leave it for twelve uninterrupted hours—a bottle of Tokay at my right, a box of Seville [snuff] to my left, in the middle an inkwell. A beautiful girl of sixteen—I should have prefered to love her only as a daughter, but alas!—was living in the house . . . and came to my room at the sound of the bell. To tell the truth the bell rang rather frequently, especially when I felt my inspiration waning.

Don Giovanni was rehearsed and produced in Prague. Da Ponte's old friend and fellow Venetian, Casanova—something of a Don Giovanni, himself—may have helped put a few finishing touches to the lyrics. This interesting possibility is backed up by at least one piece of physical evidence. Among the papers at the Castle of Dux, where Casanova spent his old age serving as librarian to Count Waldstein, were found notes in Casanova's hand rewriting parts of Act II of Don Giovanni. Considering Casanova's love life, he may have been brought into the project by Mozart and Da Ponte as a technical consultant.

The result, at any rate, was a resounding success in Prague. 'No one had ever before heard anything like it in this city,' a local newspaper declared. 'The unusually large audience applauded unanimously.' In Vienna, the opera was performed fourteen times and was reasonably well received, but the Emperor, while telling Da Ponte that he thought the work 'splendid,' added, 'but not for the likes of the Viennese'.

If the Viennese response to Don Giovanni was measured, history's has proven otherwise, and many great musicians of future generations would be inspired by this joint achievement of Mozart and Da Ponte. Tchaikovsky, to cite only one example, would write to his confidant, Frau von Meck, that, "To me, the most beautiful opera ever written is Don Juan'. And Tchaikovsky's reasons were dramatic as well as musical. 'I am quite incapable of describing what I felt on hearing Don Juan,' he wrote, 'especially in the scene where the noble figure of the beautiful, proud, revengeful woman Donna Anna appears on the stage. Nothing in any opera ever impressed me so profoundly.'

One more collaboration remained for Da Ponte and Mozart, a frivolous eighteenth-century comedy theme with only six characters—Così Fan Tutte, the tone of which might best be summed up by a few of Leporello's lines in Act I of Don Giovanni:

A forza
di chiacchiere, di vezzi e di bugie,
ch'ho imparato si bene a star con voi,
cerco d'intrattenerli.


(With chattering
flattery and humbug,
which I've picked up so well in your
service, I tried to entertain them.)

Some Viennese were mildly shocked as well as entertained by Così Fan Tutte since the plot (a refined bit of what would today be called 'wife-swapping') bore a marked resemblance to a scandal that had recently shaken Viennese society. But, as the modern English music historian, Richard Rickett has written in his Music and Musicians in Vienna, 'From a purely musical point of view, Così Fan Tutte is arguably Mozart's finest opera,' and the late Sir Thomas Beecham once described the score as 'a long summer day spent in a cloudless land by a southern sea'.

Così Fan Tutte was produced on January 26th, 1790; in February Emperor Joseph died suddenly, and the artistic community in Vienna was turned upside down. Joseph's brother and successor, Leopold, had previously reigned as Archduke of Tuscany; he brought his own entourage to Vienna with him. In addition, many of Da Ponte's old enemies now united to pay off accumulated scores. Cabal was followed by counter-cabal, and Leopold at one point expressed his disgust with Da Ponte by exclaiming, 'To the Devil with this disturber of the peace!'

Ultimately, Lorenzo found himself out of funds and favour, and decided to decamp to Trieste, after asking an Italian friend for the loan of one hundred dollars. The answer was brief and to the point: 'My Dearest Da Ponte: To lend money is almost always to lose the money and the friend. I do not care to lose either. Good luck to you.' Da Ponte had the last word in his memoirs, however, noting of his fair-weather friend that, "This good soul died young, and not in his bed,' which was Lorenzo's Italianate way of saying that the fellow was hanged by the Austrians in 1799.

Da Ponte's stay in Trieste is mainly remarkable for his meeting there with Ann Celestine Grahl, member of a Jewish family of chemists and moneylenders who had earned a fairly comfortable fortune discounting notes and dealing in drugs, spices and liquors. Twenty years younger than Lorenzo, Ann had been born in London and was a convert to Anglicanism. She was young, attractive and certainly much better off at the time than her ageing suitor, who was, by his own account, only one of several admirers. Da Ponte being Da Ponte, he carried the day and, on August 12th, the erstwhile priest and his pretty bride stepped into a calèche and set off on their honeymoon.

One of their first stops was at Dux, to visit Casanova, to whom Da Ponte may have introduced his bride as a mistress, for the sake of his reputation. The main purpose of the stop was to collect a few hundred florins owed by the senior to the junior scoundrel; but, not surprisingly, 'his purse was leaner than mine,' so all that the two exchanged during a four-day visit was reminiscences, some of which, in the form of excellent Casanovan anecdotes, found their way into the pages of Da Ponte's memoirs. The old roué also gave Lorenzo a piece of valuable parting advice:

. . . do not go to Paris—go to London . . . and when you get to London, never set foot inside the Caffé degl' Italiani and never sign your name to any bills!

'Happy me, had I religiously followed his advice!' a penitent Da Ponte would reflect in later years. He did follow it up to a point, however, settling in London in October 1792, where he spent, or misspent, the bulk of his remaining European years as a bookdealer, literary hack and theatrical impressario. It all ended in a desperate race to the gangplank of the packet Columbia in April 1805, one step ahead of the bailiffs, and the transatlantic voyage to rejoin his wife and growing family who had been shipped off to America in advance.

Despite occasional credit troubles, the Da Pontes (ultimately including two beautiful daughters, Louisa and Fanny, and two 'well-bred, well-mannered' sons, most of whom married well into socially prominent American families) flourished in America, though not before Lorenzo had tried his hand as a boarding house proprietor, a milliner, an itinerant pedlar, a licensed distiller, and had a few scrapes with the law. The two great achievements of his American years, however, dealt with his first love, words, in the form of teaching and writing.

Professor Arthur Livingston, who edited the first modern English translation of the Da Ponte memoirs, has admirably summed up Lorenzo's legacy as a teacher:

There is no doubt at all that this [his teaching debut in New York in 1807] was an important moment for the American mind. Da Ponte made Europe, poetry, painting, music, the artistic spirit, classical lore, a creative classical education, live for many important Americans as no one, I venture, had done before. And his classical scholarship, his competence as a creative Latinist, dazzled quite as much as his fame as an Italian poet . . . A flare of real genius as a teacher Da Ponte had shown at Portogruaro and Treviso. Perhaps during this year, 1808, and again in the period of 1821 to 1826, Da Ponte was finding his real self. In my estimation it is a greater moment than his casual attachment to Mozart's fame. . . .

His teaching prowess ultimately won Lorenzo the appointment as Professor of Italian at Columbia University on September 5th, 1825, a title he retained until his death. The university still possesses an interesting portrait of Da Ponte in his old age, a pen clasped in his right hand and a classic folio in his left, his expression one of well-earned calm, as if he had finally found a place where he belonged.

Not content merely to teach existing Italian classics, Da Ponte also created one of his own during his American years. Although he may have begun work on his memoirs while still in Europe, the first edition was not published in America until 1823, supplementary editions or instalments appearing in 1826, 1827, 1829 and 1830. In 1830, at the age of eighty-one, he blithely announced that he was at work on yet another instalment, and there is still some doubt as to whether or not a 'lost' manuscript was written in his last years.

What has survived is quite enough, a masterpiece of mischief, good humour, grace, fact, invention and poetic licence—in short, a classic Italian (one had better say Venetian) memoir in the tradition of Casanova and Gozzi. If, like his two more illustrious compatriots, Da Ponte occasionally let malice or old grudges get the better of him in his account of events, he could well say, as Gozzi did in his Useless Memoirs:

I have never singled out anyone for attack, apart from those who have directed attacks at me, and even then I have always used pleasantries of a moderate (sic) kind, not hurtful to their reputation.

If not true to the letter, this is certainly true to the spirit of Lorenzo Da Ponte. He died in New York in 1838 at the ripe old age of eighty-nine, and was buried in St John's Cemetery beside his beloved wife Ann, who had perished of pneumonia in 1831. Perhaps his most fitting epitaph could be drawn from the curtain lines of Così Fan Tutte which he had penned for his great collaborator, Mozart, almost half a century earlier:

Fortunato l'uom che prende
Ogni cosi pel buon verso
E tra i casi e le vicende
Da ragion guidar si fa.
Quel che suole altrui far piangere
Fai per lui cagion di riso
E del mondo in mezzo ai turbini
Bella calma trovera.


(Happy is the man who looks
At everything on the right side
And through trials and tribulations
Makes reason his guide.
What always makes another weep
Will be for him a cause of mirth
And amid the tempests of this world
He will find sweet peace.)

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