LORENZO DA PONTE
The Adventures of Mozart’s Librettist in the Old and New Worlds
By the time he was forty, Lorenzo Da Ponte had been a poet, priest, lover and libertine, a friend of Casanova, collaborator then enemy of Salieri, and ultimately the librettist for three of Mozart’s most sublime operas – The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni. After losing all his money, he started afresh as a grocer in New York, going on to found the city’s first opera house and become the first Professor of Italian at Columbia.