The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte

"Born into an Italian Jewish family in 1749, Lorenzo Da Ponte would go on to become a Catholic, a priest, a poet, a passionate lover of many women, a scandalous Enlightenment thinker banned from teaching in Venice, the librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime - and controversial - operas, a collaborator with Salieri, a friend of Casanova, and a favorite of Emperor Joseph II. He lived through the era of the Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the conquests and defeat of Napoleon - though he himself was no revolutionary, delighting in the company of the upper classes right up to the point where their intrigues turned against him. After reaching the heights of artistic success and the depths of financial ruin in some of Europe's greatest cities, he emigrated in 1805 to America, where he survived stints as a grocer and bookstore proprietor to help establish New York City's first opera house and to become, at age seventy-six, the first professor of Italian at Columbia University." "The Librettist of Venice is a vivid account of Da Ponte's passionate, picaresque life. Rodney Bolt takes readers from Old World courts and the back streets of Venice, Vienna, and London to a New World full of promise, on the trail of a man who seemed to rise phoenixlike from each new defeat.