From Mozart to Miss Stein
[Woolf is best known as one of the leaders of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and thinkers, and as the husband of novelist Virginia Woolf, with whom he founded the Hogarth Press. A Fabian socialist during the World War I era, he became a regular contributor to the socialist New Statesman and later served as literary editor of the Nation and the Athenaeum, in which much of his literary criticism is found. In the excerpt below, Woolf summarizes Da Ponte's Memoirs as the work of a failure and a rake, but intriguing as a portrait of the author's milieu.]
Da Ponte's memoirs were well worth translating into English. He was born in 1740 at Ceneda in Venetia of Jewish parents, but he was baptized at the age of fourteen and soon became an Abbé. He is chiefly remembered as the librettist of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Figaro, and Così fan tutte. His early life was lived in Venice, and he was one of those eighteenth-century adventurers, of whom the greatest was his friend Casanova. But he was neither as great a scoundrel nor as great a character as Casanova. There is something very mean and unpleasant about the ego of Lorenzo da Ponte which, for all his efforts to conceal it, creeps about the pages of his biography. A wanderer, like all adventurers, from Venice to Gorizia, from Gorizia to Dresden, from Dresden to Vienna, from Vienna to Trieste, from Trieste to London, and from London to the United States, he was always meeting with misfortunes which he ascribed to the jealousy and malice of enemies, but which were really due to his own cantankerous follies and vices. When he died at the age of eighty-nine, Professor of Italian at Columbia, but in poverty and without a single pupil, dictating "tributary verses to his kind physician," he could look back over a life of failure in which his worst enemy had been his own ego. The merit of his memoirs is that they show us this ego creeping about the strange eighteenth-century world of Venice, Vienna, and London, and then again creeping on into the still stranger nineteenth-century world of New York and Philadelphia.
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