I just returned from my daily workout. Assuming my usual running trail is probably still muddy from the rains a few days ago, my workout was all indoors. I listen to music as I exercise. I have many playlists I listen to: today, it was all of Mozart’s symphonies and concerti. Given his short life, Mozart wrote a lot of symphonies and concerti, all of which have several movements, and all of which are shuffled randomly on my player as I sweat. These are mostly quite sprightly pieces of music (my exercising is anything but sprightly). Mozart aficionados will likely disagree with me, but Mozart’s music feels less emotional than that of the composers of the next century. In the 19th century, you will get instrumental music that expresses powerful emotions: sorrow, triumph, fear, anger, love, lust—there is a reason it is called Romanticism. I like Romantic music that expresses complex emotions. One of my all time favorite pieces of music, for example, is Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, where in the space of a few bars will feel melancholy, slightly hopeful, uncertain, a constantly shifting mood. Do I think Schubert is a better composer than Mozart? Not really. But Mozart’s virtues are not the same as those of romantic composers like Schubert or Franz Listz or Beethoven or Berlioz.
Thinking about Mozart, my mind wandered over to Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Venetian who wrote the libretti to three of Mozart’s operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Who was Da Ponte?
He was a priest who had been banished from Venice as a young man for "public concubinage" and "abduction of a respectable woman.” He made friends with Antonio Salieri, a composer in Vienna, who helped him get a job as librettist for the Italian Theatre in Vienna. He became a prolific writer of libretti, including the three masterpieces by Mozart. But you are unlikely to have heard any of Da Ponte’s other operas—their composers just aren’t Mozart. (They are, if you are really interested, Salieri, Vicente Martín y Soler, Vincenzo Righini, Giuseppe Gazzaniga, Stephen Storace, Antonio Brunetti, Joseph Weigl, Francesco Bianchi, and Peter Winter. You know, those guys—composers who are lucky if they have entries in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music.) Still, writing the words for three of the greatest works of art in history helps make up for the fact that no one remembers your other 24 operas
The emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time was Emperor Joseph II. Joseph died in 1790, losing Da Ponte the royal patronage on which he depended, but before Joseph died, he wrote a letter of recommendation for Da Ponte to his sister, Marie Antoinette. Do Ponte and his girlfriend, Nancy Grahl, set out for France, but decided the political situation there was too scary, so they went to London instead. He had some success, but eventually he had to flee because he had committed the worst crime possible—being poor. He was in debt and bankrupt, so he and Nancy fled to a brand new country, the United States of America, in 1805.
He settled first in New York and then ran a grocery store in Pennsylvania, then back to New York where he taught Italian at Columbia College. He produced the first performance of Don Giovanni in the USA in 1825, and became an American citizen 1828 at the age of 79. He died in 1838 in New York City.
If you were a talented man born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, well, you just wanted to end up in Vienna. It’s hard to imagine a place more cultured and artistically vibrant in the 18th century. That Da Ponte ended up swept along by the tides of history to New York is a fascinating denouement.
.[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]