Da Ponte's American Heirs Keep Mozart's Librettist Alive

The New York Times this week profiles the American descendants of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Venetian-born poet and librettist who wrote the texts for Mozart's 'The Marriage of Figaro,' 'Don Giovanni' and 'Così fan tutte.' The report follows generations of the family who, from their base in the middle of Pennsylvania, keep alive the memory of a man expelled from both Venice and Vienna before ending his career as a grocer and professor in the young United States.

Da Ponte's story — a Jewish-born Catholic convert, a defrocked priest, a gambler and a seducer — reads as an 18th-century Italian emigration in reverse. The New York Times notes that he was booted from Venice for his scandalous life, then from Vienna after the death of his patron Emperor Joseph II, before landing in New York, where he became the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College.