Part Two of "The True Phoenix," Mozart Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte

The smash hit of November 1786, Martin y Soler's Una cosa rara (also featuring a Da Ponte libretto), crowded Figaro off the Viennese stage. However, Figaro had opened in Prague to universal acclaim and wild applause. Mozart went to the Bohemian capital in January 1787. He performed in concert on Jan. 19 and conducted Figaro on Jan. 22, each to sold-out houses. Before he left town on Feb. 8, 1787, he had been commissioned by the director of Prague's Nostitz Theater to compose a new opera. Da Ponte proposed a libretto derived from the popular legend of Don Juan. Both men were rushed: Mozart was short of money, as usual, and Da Ponte had somehow committed himself to simultaneously writing three libretti: Mozart's Don Giovanni, Salieri's Tarare or Axur, re d'Ormus and Martin y Soler's L'arbore di Diana.

Da Ponte's Memoirs claim the poet worked 12 hours daily for six months to deliver them on time. In reality, Giuseppe Gazzaniga, another composer, had recently produced his own version of Don Giovanni in Venice with a book by Giovanni Bertati. Da Ponte stole the libretto, padding it with further thefts from Tirso de Molina, Goldoni and Moliere. He even tossed in some ideas of his own.

Mozart composed the music during the summer of 1787. As usual, he was working on several projects at once, including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, which he composed that summer. Legend claims the overture was not written until two days before opening night. Yet the unified, fast-paced score betrays nothing of its stressful composition. Da Ponte's genius had transformed his forgettable source materials into shimmering verse, with subtle changes of mood, pace and emotion that sometimes seem to fuse comedy and tragedy, as does life. As with Figaro, Da Ponte's libretto reflected Mozart's inclination away from telling his story through static solo arias, preferring "an extraordinary series of ensembles" to move the action toward a series of dramatic finales, including one of the finest ballroom scenes in all theater. Don Giovanni was a new kind of opera, almost perfect on its own terms: fast-moving, sardonically humorous, lyrical, grave and profoundly human.

In October 1787, Da Ponte joined Mozart in Prague to polish the libretto. Legend claims the two men, each lodged in hotel rooms on either side of a narrow street, shouted lines and suggestions out the windows to each other as they worked on the last act. When Don Giovanni opened in Prague on Oct. 29, 1787, the audience went wild, as audiences have since. The opening in Vienna was a flop. The Emperor gently said, "I would say it is even more beautiful than Figaro; but it is not a meat suitable for the teeth of my Viennese." Mozart supposedly replied, "Give them time to chew on it."

Nearly two years later, in August 1789, the Emperor commissioned a new opera, to premiere in January 1790. Da Ponte quickly wrote Cosi fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti?"Women are like that, or the school for lovers." Of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas, Cosi alone has an original libretto, albeit one using traditional dramatic elements: men and women testing one another's fidelity through disguises and trickery. Da Ponte's libretto draws on Shakespeare's Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Marivaux's Les Fausses confidences, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Tirso de Molina's El Amor medico and La Celosa de si misma.

Cosi tastes of misogyny: Don Alfonso, the opera's master manipulator, compares trust in the female heart to "plowing the sea, sowing the sands, and gathering the wind in a net." He wagers with Guglielmo and Ferrando, two young officers, that their respective sweethearts, Fiordlilgi and Dorabella, will betray them. To prove the point, each man must disguise himself as a foreigner and woo the other's betrothed. Each succeeds. Eventually all is revealed, all are forgiven and the couples form up again as at the start, but without illusions. "Take them as they are," Don Alfonso advises: "Women are like that."

Da Ponte subtly explores and questions the very nature of truth, falsehood, fidelity and betrayal, in verse ranging from noble rhetoric to exquisitely nuanced expressions of the most intimate emotion, all within a libretto of marvelous balance and symmetry. Like the other Mozart-Da Ponte operas, Cosi remains fresh, not only because the music is perfect and the verse brilliant, but because its theme never stales: that in a society content to take illusion for reality, wisdom lies in constantly cleansing one's mind of accepted truths.

Cosi fan tutte premiered in Vienna on Jan. 26, 1790. Its success was overshadowed by the death of the Emperor. Joseph II had been an ideal patron, admiring Da Ponte's wit and skill while overlooking his personal indiscretions. Remember, Da Ponte had been exiled from Venice for adultery. He enjoyed a European reputation as an amorist surpassed only by Casanova. Carlo Ardito, in his recent biographical play Da Ponte's Last Stand, reiterates the librettist's legendary simultaneous attachment to two young ladies; their mother; the girls' French governess; and their "frisky Dalmatian housekeeper."

The new emperor, Leopold II, possessed neither his older brother's tolerance nor his compassion. In 1791, Leopold dismissed Da Ponte and forced him to leave Vienna. He briefly lived in Trieste, where in 1792, though still officially a Catholic priest, he married Ann Celestine Ernestine ("Nancy") Grahl, the young English daughter of a German merchant in the city. The marriage was successful, though, as one might expect, somewhat unconventional in the husband's understanding of his vows of chastity, and they had five children.

In 1793, they settled in London where, after some months of poverty working as a tutor of Italian, Da Ponte became librettist to the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1804, he produced two unsuccessful operas.

In April 1805, he sailed for the United States, boarding after dark to avoid bailiffs seeking his arrest and imprisonment for debt. On June 4, 1805, Da Ponte landed in Philadelphia. He was then described as "a handsome person, impeccably groomed," tall and well-built, and though "well past middle age...still youthful and vigorous." Da Ponte never returned to Europe.

The rest of Da Ponte's life was a struggle to put bread on the table for a family of five children. America had no market for librettists. Private lessons in Italian language and literature failed to provide enough money. So he became a grocer, first in New York City, then in Elizabethtown, NJ, and finally in Sunbury, PA. All his stores failed.

In 1819, he returned to New York where he once more privately taught Italian language and literature. Da Ponte found in New York a combination of welcome and incomprehension. However, his charm and extensive learning now won him a following. From 1819 to 1825, he taught more than 2000 students. He also met and charmed the Reverend Clement Clarke Moore, who began pulling strings for him. Thus, as Thomas Bergin wrote, the man who had been the friend of Mozart and the confidante of Casanova became "the protege of the author of 'The Night Before Christmas.'"

In 1825, Columbia College appointed him the nation's first professor of Italian language and literature. The college also purchased his library, which became the nucleus of Columbia's collection of Italian poetry and miscellaneous literature. Still a brilliant and witty lecturer, his classes were popular and he was the first teacher in America to lecture on Dante's Divine Comedy.

He was also writing his memoirs. He sought to speak of things "so singular in their oddity as in some manner to instruct, or at least to entertain, without wearying." He succeeded: a blend of fact and fantasy, the lively Memoirs is a minor classic of Italian literature. Picaresque, engrossing, entertaining and instructive, the book captures a man of enormous talent and unsurpassed flair who was, above all, an indefatigable survivor.

As Charles Rosen writes in his wonderful introduction to the Memoirs in the edition recently published by The New York Review of Books, "All autobiographies lie, by commission as well as omission. We do not read them for their accuracy but for their vivacity, and Lorenzo Da Ponte is among the most vivacious." What makes the Memoirs fascinating is his energy and bravura, combined with his flair for describing the world of intrigue in an arts bureaucracy and how to produce operas despite the government that funded them. Refreshingly, he is frank about his main interest, which was to make money from culture: not many memoirists have written about this as openly and as amusingly.

However, he could not make money as an impresario. In 1832-'33, Da Ponte financed a company of singers for a season of Italian opera in New York and Philadelphia. The venture was financially unsuccessful and left him in debt. Nevertheless, he raised still more money to build New York's Italian Opera House. It was the first building in this country to be specifically planned for opera, housing the first attempt to establish Italian opera permanently in the United States. Da Ponte produced 28 performances of Italian opera during the 1833-'34 season. He lost still more money and then control of the opera company itself. He took no further part in the venture and the opera house burned down in 1839.

By the late 1830s, Da Ponte was living contentedly, though in poverty, with his sons and their families in a ramshackle house on Spring St. in Greenwich Village. He remained tall, handsome and distinguished, with flowing white hair, and walked with a cane. Ardito suggests he remained as attractive to women in old age as in youth.

In the summer of 1838, in his 89th year, Lorenzo felt the approach of death with regret, though without fear. In August, he took to his bed. On Aug. 17, 1838, he called for pen, ink and paper. Propped up on pillows, the old poet wrote an ode on his own death, "Parti de la Vita." He revised the draft and wrote a fair copy. Then the master laid down his pen.