Lorenzo Da Ponte
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Categories: 1749 births | 1838 deaths | American Roman Catholics | Burials at Calvary Cemetery (Queens) | Columbia University faculty | Converts to Roman Catholicism | American Jews | Italian Jews | Italian-Americans | Italian writers | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Opera librettists | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Lorenzo Da Ponte, born Emanuele Conegliano (March 10 1749 – August 17 1838) to Geremia Conegliano and Ghella Pincherle. He was an Italian librettist and poet born in Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto). He is most famous for having written the librettos to three Mozart operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. Many of his works belonged to the Opera buffa genre. 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, unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting either profession, he was banned from both fields, and later exiled from Venice. Da Ponte worked in Dresden, and later Vienna, where he collaborated with Mozart and Antonio Salieri. He was appointed court librettist to Joseph II, for whom he composed libretti in many different languages, including French, German, and Italian. While in Vienna he also worked with composers Vicente Martín y Soler and Antonio Salieri. Da Ponte moved from Paris to London to New York City to 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 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. In 1828, at the age of 79, da Ponte became a naturalized citizen of the United States. [1] 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 Così fan tutte, an original work which he began with Salieri but completed with Mozart.
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