Thursday, November 17, 2005
Lorenzo da Ponte - revisiting our Mozart connection
LOOKING Ahead by Wally Dobelis
You may not realize it, but this is the year of our Mozart Connection. Lorenzo da Ponte, the great Mozart librettist who was buried in our neighborhood, arrived on these shores in 1805, and in October 2005 the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University celebrated the 200th anniversary of da Ponte’s arrival in the US with concerts and lectures.
This Metropolitan Opera season is also giving us an opportunity to revisit Mozart’s best operas, the Lorenzo da Ponte collaborations. reenacted in the spirit of its original 18th century earthiness. This season we have Le Nozze de Figaro (1786) and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790), skipping Don Giovanni (1787). The Mozartian maids and men nowadays must be in good voice as well as lithe, athletic and good actors willing to mix it up, which includes the occasional clutching, patting and rolling on the stage in a passionate embrace, to fully bring out the robustness of the environment for which the operas were created, that of intermingling aristocrats and servants of old Middle Europe, totally unlike the Upstairs Downstairs world of the class-conscious Victorian isles.
The originator of the literary genre was a rascally French watchmaker turned inventor, financier, courtier and social protester, playwright, Pierre Augustin Beaumarchais, six times married, always in the midst of suing and being sued, occasionally jailed and exiled. His circle of humorous plays debunking aristocracy, about the linked fortunes of Count Almaviva, a women-chasing Spanish noble, and Figaro, his barber, led to operatic adoptions by Mozart, Rossini and others, and may have contributed to the arrival of the French Revolution in 1789.
Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838), the adaptor of Beaumarchais’s tales for La Nozze, was a similar character. Born Emanuele Conegliano, son of a Jewish Italian country merchant turned Catholic, the youngster was sponsored into clergy by a bishop whose name he adapted. First as teacher and rector of the seminary, then as parish priest, the adventurous Abbe was never restrained by vows of celibacy or laws of authority. Moving to free-wheeling Venice, he consorted with the notorious seducer Giacomo Casanova, and wrote seditious verse, which caused an indictment. The poet/priest escaped to Vienna. where his charm and brilliance won him appointment as Poet to the Court Theatre, writing 40 librettos. While working with Salieri and Metastasio, the Poet to the Emperor, da Ponte became impressed by young Mozart, and persuaded the ruler, Joseph II, brother of Louis XVI’s Queen, Marie Antoinette, into patronage of the politically chancy Figaro opera, with great success. All three of his Mozartian plays – including Don Giovanni, slightly based on Casanova who seduces city and village beauties, regardless of rank and social standing – celebrate social evolution.
But da Ponte’s benefactor Emperor Joseph II died in 1791, and so did Mozart, and the poet quarreled with the successor, leading to his departure for Trieste (with the best soprano of Vienna, who was subsequently retrieved by her husband), where he met (and eventually married, as an Anglican) an Anglo-German- Jewish heiress, Ann Nancy Grahl, twenty years his junior. They had an introduction to Marie Antoinette in Paris, but she was arrested, and the family moved to London for 12 years, and the poet wrote 28 librettos and traded in rare books, until in 1805 the da Pontes with their four children crossed the ocean to the US - debtor prison was threatening - to follow Ann’s parents, who had invested in Pennsylvania real estate.
Da Ponte tried business – grocery, distillery, a delivery service in Pennsylvania, selling Italian books and culture to Americans, teaching Italian and Latin to New Yorkers – with little effect. His success came when by accident he met, in Riley’s bookstore on lower Broadway, a young Columbia graduate, Clement Clark Moore, of eventual Christmas poetry fame, who was asking about Metastasio. Moore’s father was the President of Columbia College, then downtown, and da Ponte was invited, at the age of 76, to be its first Professor of Italian, teaching Dante, Petrarca and Tasso. After the first term the attendance fell – students had to pay extra for modern languages – but da Ponte persisted, and the trustees would not let him resign. The family founded an Academy for Young Gentlemen, another for Young Ladies; they had a house at 91 Spring Street, with a bookstore downstairs, and took in student boarders. In his pursuits to popularize Italian culture, Da Ponte was able acquire sponsors for a fine Italian Opera House (built in 1833, and destroyed by fire in 1839.)
Da Ponte passed away in 1838, and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery on 3rd Avenue and 11th Street, with full pomp. Early New York was not very friendly to Catholics before the massive immigrations of the Irish and Italians starting in the 1860s changed the atmosphere. The cemetery was torn down and the interred were moved to the Calvary Cemetery in Flushing, established in 1848, where a gravestone facing Laurel Avenue announces that Lorenzo da Ponte, New Yorker, is buried there, exact location unknown. He was a true New Yorker, with most of his 33 American years spent here, establishing an Italian discipline in American learning and anchoring Italian culture firmly on this continent. And he had found freedom – his “Hymn to America,” composed by son-in-law Antonio Baglioni, was a paean
You may not realize it, but this is the year of our Mozart Connection. Lorenzo da Ponte, the great Mozart librettist who was buried in our neighborhood, arrived on these shores in 1805, and in October 2005 the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University celebrated the 200th anniversary of da Ponte’s arrival in the US with concerts and lectures.
This Metropolitan Opera season is also giving us an opportunity to revisit Mozart’s best operas, the Lorenzo da Ponte collaborations. reenacted in the spirit of its original 18th century earthiness. This season we have Le Nozze de Figaro (1786) and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790), skipping Don Giovanni (1787). The Mozartian maids and men nowadays must be in good voice as well as lithe, athletic and good actors willing to mix it up, which includes the occasional clutching, patting and rolling on the stage in a passionate embrace, to fully bring out the robustness of the environment for which the operas were created, that of intermingling aristocrats and servants of old Middle Europe, totally unlike the Upstairs Downstairs world of the class-conscious Victorian isles.
The originator of the literary genre was a rascally French watchmaker turned inventor, financier, courtier and social protester, playwright, Pierre Augustin Beaumarchais, six times married, always in the midst of suing and being sued, occasionally jailed and exiled. His circle of humorous plays debunking aristocracy, about the linked fortunes of Count Almaviva, a women-chasing Spanish noble, and Figaro, his barber, led to operatic adoptions by Mozart, Rossini and others, and may have contributed to the arrival of the French Revolution in 1789.
Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838), the adaptor of Beaumarchais’s tales for La Nozze, was a similar character. Born Emanuele Conegliano, son of a Jewish Italian country merchant turned Catholic, the youngster was sponsored into clergy by a bishop whose name he adapted. First as teacher and rector of the seminary, then as parish priest, the adventurous Abbe was never restrained by vows of celibacy or laws of authority. Moving to free-wheeling Venice, he consorted with the notorious seducer Giacomo Casanova, and wrote seditious verse, which caused an indictment. The poet/priest escaped to Vienna. where his charm and brilliance won him appointment as Poet to the Court Theatre, writing 40 librettos. While working with Salieri and Metastasio, the Poet to the Emperor, da Ponte became impressed by young Mozart, and persuaded the ruler, Joseph II, brother of Louis XVI’s Queen, Marie Antoinette, into patronage of the politically chancy Figaro opera, with great success. All three of his Mozartian plays – including Don Giovanni, slightly based on Casanova who seduces city and village beauties, regardless of rank and social standing – celebrate social evolution.
But da Ponte’s benefactor Emperor Joseph II died in 1791, and so did Mozart, and the poet quarreled with the successor, leading to his departure for Trieste (with the best soprano of Vienna, who was subsequently retrieved by her husband), where he met (and eventually married, as an Anglican) an Anglo-German- Jewish heiress, Ann Nancy Grahl, twenty years his junior. They had an introduction to Marie Antoinette in Paris, but she was arrested, and the family moved to London for 12 years, and the poet wrote 28 librettos and traded in rare books, until in 1805 the da Pontes with their four children crossed the ocean to the US - debtor prison was threatening - to follow Ann’s parents, who had invested in Pennsylvania real estate.
Da Ponte tried business – grocery, distillery, a delivery service in Pennsylvania, selling Italian books and culture to Americans, teaching Italian and Latin to New Yorkers – with little effect. His success came when by accident he met, in Riley’s bookstore on lower Broadway, a young Columbia graduate, Clement Clark Moore, of eventual Christmas poetry fame, who was asking about Metastasio. Moore’s father was the President of Columbia College, then downtown, and da Ponte was invited, at the age of 76, to be its first Professor of Italian, teaching Dante, Petrarca and Tasso. After the first term the attendance fell – students had to pay extra for modern languages – but da Ponte persisted, and the trustees would not let him resign. The family founded an Academy for Young Gentlemen, another for Young Ladies; they had a house at 91 Spring Street, with a bookstore downstairs, and took in student boarders. In his pursuits to popularize Italian culture, Da Ponte was able acquire sponsors for a fine Italian Opera House (built in 1833, and destroyed by fire in 1839.)
Da Ponte passed away in 1838, and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery on 3rd Avenue and 11th Street, with full pomp. Early New York was not very friendly to Catholics before the massive immigrations of the Irish and Italians starting in the 1860s changed the atmosphere. The cemetery was torn down and the interred were moved to the Calvary Cemetery in Flushing, established in 1848, where a gravestone facing Laurel Avenue announces that Lorenzo da Ponte, New Yorker, is buried there, exact location unknown. He was a true New Yorker, with most of his 33 American years spent here, establishing an Italian discipline in American learning and anchoring Italian culture firmly on this continent. And he had found freedom – his “Hymn to America,” composed by son-in-law Antonio Baglioni, was a paean
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 8:40 PM 
