Mozart's colleague and librettist for Don Giovanni, Nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte... a defrocked priest who used to play the violin in one of the lowest bordellos in Venice... friend and confidante of Casanova, ‘wanted’ over much of Europe... protégé of the Reverend Clement Moore, author of The Night before Christmas... first opera impresario in America... proprietor of a liquor and hardware emporium in backwoods Pennsylvania... the first professor of Italian at Columbia University...

Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) fulfilled all these roles - indeed these are only a few episodes in a long, adventurous life in Italy, Austria, London and the New World. A high- ly gifted man, like Beaumarchais and Casanova, he was one of those peculiarly 18th-cen- tury semi-scoundrels who were also men of great charm, culture, intelligence and wit.

Da Ponte was born a Jew, ordained Abbé in the Catholic Church, and subsequently was an emigré to the United States, where he lived with his wife and family. Born Emmanuel Cenegliano in the nearby city of Ceneda, his family converted to Christianity when he was 14 and he was baptized in the Cathedral. The bishop of the see, recognising the young boy’s talents, gave him his own name and sent him to the local seminary to be edu- cated. From there he went on to teach at the University of Treviso; however his liberal politics and penchant for married women led to a ban on his teaching and, in 1779, a 15-year exile from Venice. He departed for Vienna, where he took up his famous collab- oration with Mozart, but the death of his patron Joseph II led to his dismissal in 1791.

Così fan Tutte

The successes of Mozart’s early years in Vienna culminated in the opera Le Nozze di Figaro. This success was followed by that of Don Giovanni, also to a Da Ponte libretto. In 1789 the Emperor Joseph II ordered a revival of Figaro and following on its success commissioned a further opera from the Mozart/Da Ponte partnership. Da Ponte's model for his libretto is unknown, although the closest so far discovered is Cervantes’ La novela del curioso impertimente incorporated into Don Quixote, and which formed the basis of Anfossi’s opera Il curioso indiscreto. Although partner-swapping was a common theme in 18th-century plays, and the idea of disguise to check the chastity of a wife may be traced back to the myth of Cephalus and Procris in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, there are also clear parallels with works such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Rehearsals for the first performances of Cosi took place in January 1790, but the first performances were overshadowed by the death of Emperor Joseph II on 20th February. Performances were resumed in July and August but the work was then dropped, although it received many performances elsewhere.

Throughout the 19th century it was regarded as being immoral and frivolous, utterly unworthy of Mozart’s genius. George Bernard Shaw wrote of its libretto: ‘The despised book after all has some fun in it, though quite as good plays have often been improvised in ten minutes in a drawing room in charades or dumb crumbo’. Today it has become as popular as Mozart's other operas, as we believe that the psychological truths beneath the play are revealed by Mozart's music.