Lorenzo antonio biography mozart
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Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Maestro of Second Acts, in Opera and in Life
30-7-2006
Lorenzo da Ponte
(1749-1838)
Le opere di Lorenzo da Ponte online, qui
July 21, 2006
Books of The Times | ‘The Librettist of Venice’
Review by CHARLES McGRATH
THE LIBRETTIST OF VENICE
The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America
By Rodney Bolt
Illustrated. 428 pages. Bloomsbury. $29.95.
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 “Così Fan Tutte,” wound up in New York, running a grocery store on the Bowery?
Da Ponte, the subject of Rodney Bolt’s biography “The Librettist of Venice,” took himself very seriously, and yet he led a life that was itself a kind of length
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The life of Lorenzo Da Ponte
But how much do we know about their other creator – librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte? Though often overshadowed by the younger composer, his is the more extraordinary story – a life as compelling as it is contradictory.
A Jew who lived his life as a Catholic, Da Ponte was by turns a priest, a poet, a professional gambler and quite possibly a pimp. A man who started his career in the Italian church, ended it in America – initially as a grocer and then, in a final sleight of hand, as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. It’s a breathless biography, a story of role-playing and survival skills more outlandish than anything Da Ponte would dare dream up for his own characters.
At the age of 14 Lorenzo da Ponte’s life took a sudden left-turn. The teenager’s prospects, ambitions, even his name changed all but overnight when his father – a modestly successful Jewish tanner living in the Veneto – decided to marry. His chosen bride was
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Lorenzo Da Ponte Librettist of Mozart in Venice (1749-1838)
Lorenzo da Ponte His real name was Emanuele Conegliano, also known as Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Mozart's librettist
An operatic genius, he wrote the librettos for the following operas for Mozart:The Marriage of Figaro in 1786.
Don Juan in 1787.
Cosi Fan Tutte in 1790.
Da Ponte's incredible career
Da Ponte was born in Ceneda (today Vittorio Veneto) in 1749.Son of a widowed Jewish tailor, who converted in beställning to marry a 17-year-old Catholic girl.
The father and his three sons then received the patronymic of Da Ponte from the Bishop of Ceneda at the same time as their baptism.
And so, in 1763, Emanuele Conegliano became... Lorenzo Da Ponte.
He studied at the Seminary and was ordained a priest in 1773.
From präst to... Libertine and Gambler
1776: the writing of a Rousseauist-leaning opuscule forces him to resign from his teaching brev at the seminary.He was then sent to Venice, where he