L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014 www.italoamericano.com 10 Dear Readers, Lorenzo Da Ponte, born March 1749 in Ceneda, Italy is best known as the librettist for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Così Fan Tutte (1790). However, it is as a pioneer, bringing awareness of the musi- cal and literary heritage of Italy and opening eyes to the splen- dors of the operatic stage, that American opera goers are really in his debt. Da Ponte was skilled in the great traditions of Italian poetry where he began to write words to be set to music. He was the consummate poet who happened to write for the theater, and the zenith of his success was achieved in his late thirties with his three libretti for Mozart- The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte. Da Ponte suffered from chron- ic financial problems. He was no good with money, neither his own, nor anyone else's. An expansive, generous artist with a taste for fine things, he was the kind of fellow that enjoyed picking up the check even when his pockets were empty. He was chased out of various European cities, Venice, Vienna, London for unpaid bills or romantic indiscretions. Da Ponte tended to fall madly in love, not frequently so much as inap- propriately. The troubles that led Da Ponte to join his wife Nancy and their four children in America in 1805 had begun many years before. Da Ponte, born Jewish (original name: Emanuele Conegliano) in Ceneda, Italy, but baptized along with his father and brothers and given the name of the city's bishop, left the priesthood and from Ceneda, moved to Venice, for centuries a powerful city-state, before falling under Austrian dominion. It wasn't until 1866 that it became a part of the Italian Republic. It was in Venice that Da Ponte courted disaster with such successive liaison. "Whoever is faithful to one woman only betrays the rest", Don Giovanni explains in Act 11, Scene I of the opera. Soon romantic entanglements led Da Ponte to Vienna, where he combined his facility with Italian poetry and love for music. A failed collaboration with Salieri, Mozart's jealous rival, made Da Ponte available to Mozart himself. With the great Mozart operas, all three created within a mere four years, Da Ponte made his name forever. In Trieste he met the Englishwoman Nancy Grahl, twenty years younger than he, married her and moved to London. London was hospitable only briefly. Ventures involving a bookstore and several theater projects quickly turned sour. Impresario William Taylor, who promised Da Ponte the moon if he could raise some capital on his name, deftly sidestepped his considerable debts by getting himself elected to parliament, a status that made him immune to prosecution and left Da Ponte holding the bag. On Da Ponte's fifty-first birth- day, 1800, the poet was arrested in his nightclothes. For the next five years he would try to straighten out his finances. Nancy and the kids sailed for Philadelphia in 1804 to join her family, most of whom had set- tled there years earlier. By 1805, Da Ponte's only alternative to debtor's prison was to flee. He borrowed one hundred guineas, and followed his family to America. The crossing took fifty seven days. Da Ponte gambled away what little money he carried and had to borrow back fifty dollars from the Philadelphia merchant who'd won his money. Da Ponte deplored the lack of grand opera in New York, as well as the lack of anything Italian, not just opera, but books and food and wine. There were many delicacies and ingredients he just couldn't get and most cheeses, for example, would spoil during the ocean crossing. Friends and relatives brought him chestnuts and salami, and he was always trying to procure vine roots and olive seeds, any- thing that could put a touch of Italy into Manhattan soil. It was while expounding on Italian literature outside a Broadway bookshop, speaking in thickly accented English that Da Ponte met Clement Moore, already famous for his poem "The Night Before Christmas". Moore encouraged Da Ponte to teach. In December 1807, Da Ponte conducted his first Italian literature class in the house of Clement Moore's father, who was then president of Columbia College. Da Ponte could walk to work (Columbia was then located downtown). The problem with teaching Italian literature was that nobody could find Italian books in New York. Da Ponte had his stepbrother ship, from London, a set of Italian classics. These books provided the foundation for his classes, in which only Italian was spoken. The classes were popular for awhile. When enrollment faltered Da Ponte faced a money crunch and decided to leave New York. He moved to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where his in-laws housed him, but put him down for his failures. From 1809 to 1818 he worked sporadically as a trader, shuttling between Sunbury and Philadelphia. All this time Da Ponte was compos- ing Italian sonnets. When Clement Moore became Professor of Greek at Columbia College, the first Chair in Italian Literature at Columbia was specifically created for Da Ponte. The position, largely decorative, hardly lightened Da Ponte's financial load. Soon he set himself up as a bookseller as well as professor, peddling Petrarch and Boccaccio and his beloved Dante. He was seventy. And he and Nancy, who gave her own class- es in cooking and social graces, hosted Italian suppers for their students and for European visi- tors. Wine flowed. Da Ponte began to write his memoirs, the first volume privately printed in 1825. As a set of three they were published in Italy in 1871 and later in the USA. At the end of the decade Da Ponte's young Italian niece Giulia, whose reputation for beauty of face and voice were the talk of the family, agreed at his behest to come to New York. He went so far as to reserve the Bowery Theater for her debut, but he couldn't get her over before the lease ran out. It was just as well. Giulia turned out to be as beautiful as rumored, but although she sang at Da Ponte's eighty-first birthday party, she just didn't have the voice to carry an opera compa- ny. Da Ponte was outliving many of his children and grandchil- dren. His greatest loss came when Nancy died in 1831, at sixty two, of pneumonia. Redoubling his efforts to install opera in Manhattan, Da Ponte, in 1832, brought over an Italian opera company managed by French tenor Jacques Montresor, setting up at the Richmond Hill Theater, a down- town mansion once owned by Aaron Burr. New Yorkers were so dazzled that the owners of the Richmond Hill Theater renamed it the Italian Opera House. After a professionally disastrous stay in Philadelphia, however, tenor Montresor left for Havana and died there, leaving Da Ponte with still more unpaid bills. Da Ponte (in his early eighties) summoned the strength to raise $150,000 for the new Italian Opera House, a building distinct from the old Richmond Hill Theater. With much fanfare the Italian Opera House opened on November 18, 1833, with Rossini's La Gazza Ladra. Four hours long, the opera was said to put half the audience to sleep. By the end of the summer of 1834 the Italian Opera House was operating at a $30,000 loss; Da Ponte and his partner Chevalier Rivafinoli were let go from the project they helped originate. The Opera House staggered for two more seasons, then its investors pulled the plug. The building became a legitimate theater, the National, in 1836. Despite the undeniable failure of the Italian Opera House, Italian grand opera had caught the imagination of American music lovers. This led directly to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. Opera became permanent- ly fixed in New York and, by extension, in America... *** Lorenzo Da Ponte, Librettist for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte

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