Lorenzo da ponte biography of williams

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Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838)

He was born "Emanuele Conegliano" in Ceneda (now the Italian city of Vittorio Veneto) in the Venetian Republic. [2]

All of Da Ponte's works were adaptations of pre-existing plots, as was common among librettists of the time, with the exceptions of L'arbore di Diana with Vicente Martín y Soler, and Così fan tutte, which he began with Salieri, but completed with Mozart.

He was not salaried: students paid him directly, and registration fluctuated. Still later, he studied to be a teacher and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1773, after training at the seminary at Portogruaro. In London, he struggled to make ends meet as a teacher and a grocer before securing a position as librettist to the King's Theatre in 1803. He brought dozens of Italian books with him from overseas and ordered more in hopes of reselling them in his new country.

His version of the Don Juan legend has had a lasting literary influence. His funeral attracted an enormous crowd of New York's most cultured names, from the richest to the poorest. Emanuele took the name of Lorenzo da Ponte from the Bishop of Ceneda who baptised him. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation.

ISBN 978-3-7757-1748-9

  • Russo, Joseph Louis. The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library at the University of California at Los Angeles has named in his memory. He was Lorenzo Da Ponte, a defrocked Italian priest who twenty years earlier had written the libretti to three Mozart operas — Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte.

    Excessive running costs and his lack of business acumen saw it sold to cover debts just two years later, but it was the predecessor of the New York Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera. New York: AMS Press, 1966.

    Before his marriage at Trieste in 1791 to the German-Jewish Nancy Grahl (by whom he had six children), he had at least three serious mistresses and in Venice he'd been friends with the most renowned Lothario of them all, Casanova.

    Charged with "public concubinage and rapito di donna onesta" (abduction of a respectable woman), Da Ponte was banished from Venice for fifteen years.[1]

    Da Ponte travelled to Austria, and applied for the post of Poet to the Theatres. New York: The Orion Press, 1959. Another distinction shared by him with Mozart is the fact his place of burial is unmarked.

    1913. 

  • Persondata
    NameDa Ponte, Lorenzo
    Alternative namesConegliano, Emanuele (real name)
    Short descriptionVenetian opera librettist and poet
    Date of birth10 March 1749
    Place of birthCeneda, Republic of Venice
    Date of death17 August 1838
    Place of deathNew York
    Categories:
    • 1749 births
    • 1838 deaths
    • People from Vittorio Veneto
    • Italian Jews
    • American Jews
    • American Roman Catholics
    • Burials at Calvary Cemetery (Queens, New York)
    • Columbia University faculty
    • Converts to Roman Catholicism from Judaism
    • American people of Italian descent
    • Italian writers
    • Venetian emigrants to the United States
    • Naturalized citizens of the United States
    • Italian opera librettists
    • American opera librettists
    • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's librettists
    • Italian expatriates in Austria
    • 18th-century Roman Catholic priests
    • Italian Roman Catholic priests
    He briefly ran a grocery store in Philadelphia and gave private Italian lessons before returning to New York to open a bookstore.

    This may be because his work is viewed as derivative. “He said, ‘I could spend a month naming eminent Italian writers and poets.’” 

    The twenty-eight-year-old Moore, a biblical scholar who later gained fame for the poem known as “The Night Before Christmas,” was impressed by Da Ponte and introduced him to his father, the Right Reverend Benjamin Moore 1768KC, 1789HON, who was the president of Columbia College.

    lorenzo da ponte biography of williams

    ISBN 88-7050-438-7

  • Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Il Mezenzio", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2000. His father converted in order to marry a Christian woman (his first wife died in 1754).