Conegliano was a Jew by birth. His widowed father converted himself and his three sons to Roman Catholicism in order to marry a young Christian woman. The 14-year-old Conegliano took the name Lorenzo Da Ponte, the name of the bishop of Ceneda who administered the baptism. Still later, he studied to be a teacher and was ordained a Catholic priest. However, he was unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting either profession. While he was priest of the church of San Luca in Venice, Da Ponte took as his mistress Angioletta Bellaudi, who not only had been little better than a prostitute since she was ten, but was also married. Father da Ponte apparently acted as midwife when their first child was all but born in the street, on which he commented that it was "the kind of incident that happens every day". Reprimanded by the vicar-general, Da Ponte and Angioletta opened a brothel, where the priest played the violin in his cassock. Charged with "public concubinage and rapto di donna onesta" (abduction of a respectable woman), Da Ponte was sentenced to banishment from Venice for fifteen years.[1]
Da Ponte travelled to Austria, arriving with nothing but a small vocabulary of amorous German learnt in the arms of an innkeeper's wife at the border. He applied for the vacant post of Poet to the Theatres. Asked by the Emperor Joseph II how many plays he had written, Da Ponte replied "None, Sire", which brought the reply "Good, good! Then we shall have a virgin muse.".[1]
Da Ponte later moved to Paris, London, New York City and Philadelphia, where he briefly ran a grocery store and gave private Italian lessons before returning to New York to open a bookstore. At one point, he may have played the organ at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. He became friends with Clement Clarke Moore, the supposed author of "Twas the Night Before Christmas", and through him gained an appointment as the first Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia College (now known as Columbia University). He was the first faculty member to have been born a Jew, and also the first to have been ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.
Another distinction shared by him with Mozart is the fact his place of burial is unmarked. Da Ponte was originally buried in a Catholic cemetery in Manhattan near Old Saint Patrick's Cathedral. These interments were later removed to Calvary Cemetery in Queens with little attention paid to who was who. A cenotaph to Da Ponte's memory is found at Calvary.
All but two of Da Ponte's works are adaptations of pre-existing plots, as was common among librettists of the time. Le nozze di Figaro, for example, is based on a play by Pierre Beaumarchais, as is Axur re d?Ormus, which Da Ponte wrote for Salieri. The minor exception is L'arbore di Diana; the great exception Coś fan tutte, an original work which he began with Salieri but completed with Mozart.
Works
Opera Librettos
Ifigenia in Tauride (1783, ital. translation of the French opera Iphigénie en Tauride - composer Christoph Willibald Gluck)
Russo, Joseph Louis. Lorenzo Da Ponte Poet and Adventurer. Columbia University studies in romance philology and literature. New York: AMS Press, 1966. googlebooks.com Accessed October 15, 2007
Bolt, Rodney, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte - Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America, New York: Bloomsbury, 2006 ISBN 1596911182
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, Memorie, New York: 1823-27; English edition: Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, translated by Elizabeth Abbott, annotated by Arthur Livingstone. New York: The Orion Press, 1959. ISBN 0306762900
Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart's Librettist, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 ISBN 0299178749
Holden, Anthony, The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte , London: Orion Publishing Company, 2007 ISBN 075382180X
Hüttler, Michael (ed.): Lorenzo Da Ponte. Vienna: Böhlau, 2007 (Maske & Kothurn, 52/4) (ISBN 978-3-205-77617-8)
Jewish Museum, Vienna (pub.), Lorenzo Da Ponte - Challenging the New World, exhibition catalogue from the Jewish Museum ISBN 978-3-7757-1748-9, ISBN 3-7757-1748-X
Russo, Joseph Louis, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Poet and Adventurer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1922 ISBN 0404506321
Steptoe, Anthony, Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural and Musical Background to "Le nozze di Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "Cosi fan tutte", New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1988 ISBN 019313215X
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Libretti viennesi", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano-Parma: Fondazione Bembo-Ugo Guanda Editore, 1999, due volumi. ISBN 88-8246-060-6
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Estratto delle Memorie", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1999. ISBN 88-7050-438-7
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Il Mezenzio", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2000. ISBN 88-7050-310-0
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Saggio di traduzione libera di Gil Blas", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2002. ISBN 88-7050-461-1
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Dante Alighieri", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2004. ISBN 88-7050-462-X
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Saggi poetici", a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2005. ISBN 88-7050-463-8
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, "Libretti londinesi" a cura di Lorenzo della Chà, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 2007. ISBN 88-7050-464-6
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