The True Phoenix: Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte Inspired Mozart to New Heights

In 1839, Daniel E. Sickles, a young man of good bearing and low tastes, pressured by his father to aspire beyond drink and fornication, engaged a tutor to prepare him for college. Prof. Lorenzo L. Da Ponte, who taught belles-lettres at New York University, even invited Sickles to stay in the ramshackle house on Spring St. where the professor lived with his wife and their children; his brother and his family; and his widowed father.

Even as he found his tutor an inspired teacher, Sickles was fascinated by the professor's father, also named Lorenzo Da Ponte. Then 89, the elder Da Ponte was tall, handsome and affable. He might discourse on art, literature, music and women in one of over half a dozen languages, even as an infant was suckled in a corner and spaghetti boiled over in the kitchen. The old rake had been, as Thomas Bergin observed, "the friend of Mozart, the confidante of Casanova, and the protégé of the author of 'The Night Before Christmas.'" Lorenzo Da Ponte had been a poet, teacher, priest, professional gambler, playwright, bookseller, grocer, proprietor of a bordello and the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. Most importantly, he had written the libretti for three incomparable operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte.

He had been born Emanuele Conegliano on March 10, 1749, in the Jewish ghetto of Ceneda, near Venice. When Emanuele was 14, his widowed father embraced Christianity together with his sons. As was customary, the Coneglianos adopted the surname of the local bishop, Monsignor Da Ponte. Emanuele took the prelate's first name, Lorenzo. Like many young men of his time, Lorenzo entered the seminary for a free education. A brilliant student, he quickly mastered Hebrew and Latin. He became an instructor in 1770, professor of languages and then vice rector in 1771.

In 1771, he first visited Venice, beginning a series of love affairs that would make him notorious, and briefly moved there in the fall of 1773, taking up a life of idleness, gambling and sexual dissipation. Meanwhile, he had been ordained a Roman Catholic priest although, as he wrote in his memoirs, the priesthood was "wholly contrary to my temperament, my character, my principles, and my studies."

From 1774 to 1776, he taught Italian literature at the seminary in Treviso. He was a brilliant, witty lecturer, and thus criticized by bores who claimed his style concealed a lack of learning. Then the Venetian Senate determined he had used Jean-Jacques Rousseau's subversive Discourse on the Sciences and Arts as the basis of his pupils' recitations during the ceremonies closing the seminary's academic year. Rousseau believed man in a state of nature was more fully human, whereas civilization "offered only false appearance without reality, without truth." As Da Ponte wrote in his memoirs, the theme "appeared, or, at least, was made to appear, scandalous, unwise, and contrary to the good order and peace of society." He was banned from teaching for life.

Thereafter, he returned to the city, where he survived by gambling and lived for debauchery. Within three years, his sexual, financial and other delinquencies had become so gross as to compel the authorities of an unusually tolerant city to exile him for "libertinage, blasphemy, sacrilege, adultery, and public concubinage." He fled to Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire. There, he cobbled together a translation of a tragedy for the local stage. The profits persuaded him to live by the pen. He traveled to Dresden to stay with an acquaintance, Caterino Mazzola, the court poet to the Saxon dukes. Da Ponte became his unofficial assistant, rewriting scenes, working on productions and learning the ways of actors and singers.

By early 1782, Da Ponte, now far more knowledgeable of stagecraft, was in Vienna with a letter of recommendation to Antonio Salieri, the leading composer in service to the imperial court. Salieri's fame endures through an unsubstantiated but persistent legend of implication in Mozart's death, immortalized in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart and Salieri, based on a play by Alexander Pushkin, and revived in our times by Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. The composer realized that Da Ponte was unusual: while most librettists were scandalously inept, semiliterate and ill-paid hacks such that the word "librettist" had fallen into disrepute, Da Ponte was skillful, witty and inspired.

In 1783, Joseph II, the Holy Roman emperor, established a new Italian opera company for the imperial theater. Though Da Ponte had never written a libretto, Salieri, charmed by Da Ponte's wit and talent, obtained his appointment as librettist to the Italian troupe, which carried with it direct access to the Emperor. Thereafter, he wrote numerous libretti for Salieri, Martin y Soler, Righini and Storace, the leading composers of Italian opera of the day, and supervised their production. Despite his personal indiscretions, Da Ponte would hold the post for nine years.

In March 1783, he met an overworked professional musician in desperate need of a decent libretto. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had begun composing music before he could write and had learned the violin by watching his father play, without lessons. After watching his sister's clavier lessons, he began playing the instrument at the age of three. He had gone on tour at the age of six and had been one of the most famous performers in Europe.

Now he was 27, "...a remarkably small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine fair hair, of which he was rather vain..." In 1782, the Count Rosenberg-Orsini, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Mozart to consider composing an Italian opera. He began leafing through libretti. Eventually he would examine more than 100. All were dreadful. Mozart had written, "...It is my view that in an opera the poetry must be without question the obedient daughter to the music... An opera is all the more sure of success when the plot is well worked out and the words are written solely for the music and not added here and there for the sake of some silly rhyme... The best thing of all is when a good composer...comes across a skillful poet, that true phoenix, then one need have no worries even concerning the applause of the ignorant."

Within two months, Da Ponte had promised to write Mozart a libretto. "He has an excruciating amount of work to do on the theater repertory and at the moment has the urgent charge of writing an entirely new libretto for Salieri, which will take at least two months," wrote Mozart. "He has promised next to write a new libretto for me. But who knows whether he will be able or want to keep his word." Da Ponte reshuffled his schedule, and a libretto, supposedly from his pen, entitled The Deluded Bridegroom, landed on Mozart's work desk. The composer had even written part of the first act when he went to Da Ponte with a new idea.

The Marriage of Figaro by the extraordinary French adventurer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had been first performed in 1784. Figaro was subversive, questioning the aristocratic social order. Its performance had been banned in Paris and in Vienna. Mozart, who liked the subject matter?the play was the sequel to The Barber of Seville, an operatic version of which was a proven success?suggested it to Da Ponte, who promised to persuade the Emperor to change his mind.

...I...proposed writing the words and the music secretly and awaiting then a favorable opportunity to show them to the Directors, or to the Emperor himself, for which step I confidently volunteered to assume the responsibility.

I set to work, accordingly, and as fast as I wrote the words, Mozart set them to music. In six weeks, everything was in order. Mozart's lucky star ordained that the Opera should fail of scores at just that moment. Seizing that opportunity,I went, without saying a word to a living person, to offer Figaro to the Emperor.

Da Ponte talked the Emperor into permitting the play's use for the libretto. Then the Italian edited the text, cutting scenes, characters, speeches and entire counter-plots to emphasize human relationships rather than politics. Even so, the libretto was not without sharpness, and the music heightened its effect.

Yet Da Ponte's work had been far more complicated than merely editing Beaumarchais's text. The music and libretto work as one, with Da Ponte taking Mozart's guidance in matters of meter, placing vowels and assigning lines to the appropriate musical genre, whether recitative, aria or ensemble. The men liked each other, which evidences Da Ponte's talent and hard work, for Mozart was an extremely demanding collaborator. Da Ponte, in turn, possessed a wit, elegance of expression and understanding of the human condition that rivaled the composer's.

By the late 18th century, opera had become "a succession of recitative entrances and aria exits," which Mozart and Da Ponte found dramatically static and utterly boring. The audiences agreed: most performances were accompanied by clattering dishes and clinking glasses, the noise of card parties in the boxes and the hum of gossip. Some held that going to the opera would be a lovely experience if it weren't for the music.

Mozart was experimenting with new operatic structures as early as 1775. However, Da Ponte's libretto, combining brilliant wit with brilliant management of stage space?getting the singers on and off the stage and reuniting them at the end of each act for the finale?inspired Mozart to go further. Figaro became a continuous succession of animated scenes, each dovetailing smoothly into the next. As Robert Gutman writes, Figaro relies on the ensemble rather than the aria or recitative, weaving "musical lines of individual character and tonal gesture, each strand with a life of its own...[as] the vocal and orchestral lines twine, separate, and reunite in confrontation, opposition, and accommodation." In effect, the singing becomes a form of conversation rather than a series of monologues, building toward finales that transform opera from costumed oratorios into works of movement and action, each finale becoming, as Da Ponte wrote, "a kind of little comedy or operetta all by itself."

By early November 1785, Da Ponte finished the libretto. Six months later, Mozart finished the score. On May 1, 1786, Figaro premiered at the Burgtheatre in Vienna. It was a triumph. Some complained of the length or the complicated orchestral writing. But Mozart and Da Ponte had won the single critic who counted. The Emperor thought the opera "divine."

To be continued .