Emanuele Conegliano of Ceneda
Lorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on 10 March 1749 in Ceneda, a small town in the Republic of Venice that is now part of Vittorio Veneto. He was born a Jew, the eldest of three sons of Geronimo Conegliano, and grew up in the town’s small Jewish community. His mother died young. When Emanuele was in his early teens his widowed father, wishing to marry a Catholic woman, converted to Roman Catholicism and had his sons baptised with him.
As was the custom for converts, the boy took the name of the man who baptised him, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the bishop of Ceneda. The bishop also opened the doors of the local seminary to the three Conegliano brothers, giving a merchant’s son from the ghetto an education in Latin, Italian literature and classical rhetoric that would otherwise have been closed to him. Lorenzo proved a brilliant student with a gift for verse in both Latin and Italian, and after the bishop’s death in 1768 he moved to the seminary at Portogruaro, where he became a teacher of literature. He was ordained a priest in 1773.
A priest in Venice, and exile
The priesthood was a career rather than a vocation. In 1773 Da Ponte moved to Venice, the most pleasure-loving city in Europe, earning his living as a teacher of languages while writing poetry and moving through its literary and gambling circles. While serving as a priest at the church of San Luca he took a mistress and fathered children. In 1777 he met Giacomo Casanova, who became his friend for more than twenty years; the two Venetian adventurers recognised each other as kindred spirits.
His political poems and his private life eventually caught up with him. In 1779 he was tried for public concubinage and for the abduction of a respectable woman; it was alleged that he had been living in a brothel and organising its entertainments. He was found guilty and banished from the Venetian republic for fifteen years. He went first to Gorizia, then under Austrian rule, and then to Dresden, where his friend the court poet Caterino Mazzolà gave him work translating libretti and a letter of introduction to the composer Antonio Salieri in Vienna.
Poet of the imperial theatre
With Salieri’s help, Da Ponte became librettist to the Italian theatre of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna, a post that put him at the centre of the most brilliant musical city in Europe. He wrote for Salieri, for the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler, whose Una cosa rara was one of the great hits of the decade, and for others; in all he wrote libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers. Like most librettists of his time he usually adapted existing plays and plots, but he did so with a speed, wit and theatrical instinct that gave old material new life. He met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through the banker Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, a patron of both men, and Mozart, who had been looking for a good Italian poet, was eager to work with him.
Their first collaboration was Le nozze di Figaro, adapted from Beaumarchais’s comedy The Marriage of Figaro, a play notorious for its mockery of aristocratic privilege. Da Ponte cut its sixteen characters to eleven and removed a whole act and many scenes. In his printed preface he explained that he had made not a translation but an imitation, an extract, aiming to paint the play’s passions faithfully and in full colour and to offer a new kind of spectacle. The opera opened at the Burgtheater in 1786.
Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così
Don Giovanni followed in 1787, premiered in Prague. Da Ponte took as his starting point a libretto by Giovanni Bertati, but the critic David Cairns has shown that he borrowed few words and at every point made the story wittier, more concise and more effective, restructuring the action to give Mozart the musical shapes he needed. Così fan tutte, the third collaboration, opened in Vienna in 1790; unusually, its story appears to have been Da Ponte’s own invention, a work he had begun with Salieri and finished with Mozart.
Together these three operas changed what opera could be. Da Ponte’s special gift, as the musicologist Richard Taruskin put it, was to forge a mixture of comic and serious idioms into a vivid dramatic shape. His texts gave Mozart characters who were neither the stock figures of comic opera nor the remote heroes of serious opera, but recognisable people, servants and aristocrats, lovers and deceivers, whose feelings could change within a single ensemble. Mozart’s music made those people immortal, but it was Da Ponte who gave them their words, their situations and their sharp, ironic intelligence. More than two centuries later, these three works remain at the core of the operatic repertoire, performed in opera houses on every continent.
London, and flight to America
Joseph II died in 1790, and with him Da Ponte’s protection. Court intrigues led to his dismissal in 1791. In Trieste he met Nancy Grahl, the English daughter of a Jewish chemist; she became his lifelong companion and the mother of his children, though they appear never to have formally married. Armed with a letter of recommendation to Marie Antoinette, he set out for Paris in 1792, but on the road the news of the Revolution turned him towards London instead, a course Casanova had urged on him.
After a precarious start, working among other things as a grocer and an Italian teacher, he became librettist at the King’s Theatre in London in 1803. But debts and bankruptcy followed, and in 1805 he fled to the United States, where Nancy and the children joined him. He tried his hand as a grocer in New York and New Jersey, then as a shopkeeper and teacher in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, with little commercial success. What he did have was an inexhaustible enthusiasm for Italian literature and a talent for teaching it.
Bringing Italy to New York
In New York Da Ponte opened a bookshop, gave private lessons to the children of wealthy families and became a tireless promoter of Italian culture. Through his friend Clement Clarke Moore, he met Moore’s father, the president of Columbia College, and in 1825, at the age of 76, he was appointed Columbia’s first professor of Italian. The post carried no salary; he was paid by whatever students enrolled. He sold the college hundreds of Italian books, laying the foundations of its Italian collection, and Columbia’s Italian department today honours him with a professorship that bears his name. He was the first Catholic priest, and the first person born a Jew, to join the Columbia faculty.
He also brought opera itself. In 1826 he helped bring about the first complete performance in the United States of Don Giovanni, sung in Italian by the touring company of the tenor Manuel García, whose daughter Maria (later famous as Maria Malibran) sang Zerlina. He organised tours for Italian singers, and in 1833, at 84, he led the founding of the Italian Opera House at Leonard and Church Streets, the first theatre in New York built specifically for opera. It failed within two seasons, but it is remembered as a forerunner of the city’s later opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera. He became an American citizen in 1828.
A Jew, a priest and a survivor
Da Ponte’s Jewish origins were not something he chose, and he lived his adult life as a Catholic and a priest. Yet the experience of being converted as a child, renamed and remade, shadowed his life. Historians have noted how often he lived in disguise, as Jew, priest, libertine, merchant and professor, and the scholar David Conway has suggested that this gave his treatment of the old theatrical device of disguise in Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni a special ironic depth.
His story belongs to a larger one: the first generations of Jews entering European cultural life in the age of Enlightenment, often only through the door of baptism. Da Ponte’s path, from a small Jewish community in the Veneto to the court of Vienna and then to the New World, mirrors in miniature the journeys of millions who came after him. The Jewish Museum Vienna devoted an exhibition to him, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Challenging the New World.
Character and last years
Da Ponte was charming, vain, quarrelsome, endlessly hopeful and hopeless with money. His Memoirs, which the pianist and critic Charles Rosen described as a picaresque adventure story rather than an intimate self-portrait, are entertaining, self-serving and not always reliable, but they kept his name alive when the librettists of his era were otherwise forgotten. He outlived most of his world: Mozart, Casanova, Joseph II, and in 1831 Nancy, whose death he mourned in a cycle of sonnets.
He died in New York on 17 August 1838, aged 89, and was given a large funeral at the old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. He was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Manhattan whose remains were later moved to Calvary Cemetery in Queens; the exact site of his grave is unknown, and a memorial stone now marks his memory there.
Legacy
Every night, somewhere in the world, an audience hears Da Ponte’s words. The three operas he wrote with Mozart are among the most performed and most studied works in the history of music, and they remain a benchmark for the union of words and music in opera. In America his legacy is just as concrete, if less famous: he planted Italian opera in New York, built the city’s first opera house and founded the academic study of Italian language and literature at one of its great universities. A boy born into a Jewish family in a small Venetian town, baptised, exiled and bankrupt more than once, he ended his life as a bridge between the musical culture of the Old World and the New.
Sources & further reading
Lorenzo Da Ponte, Wikipedia · How Mozart’s Librettist Became the Father of Italian Studies at Columbia, Columbia Magazine · Lorenzo Da Ponte in New York City, Primo Levi Center · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.