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.
