Italian poet and librettist, best known for his librettos for Mozart's operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Juan and All These Things.
Emmanuele Conegliano was born on 10 March 1749 in the Jewish ghetto of Cieneda, near Treviso, in what was then known as the Venetian Republic. In 1763, he converted to Christianity with his father and changed his name to Lorenzo Da Ponte in accordance with the name of the local bishop who had baptised him. For a time he took clerical vows, but because of his libertine views and his adultery (he was acquainted with Casanova and kept a brothel), Lorenzo was expelled from the Venetian republic in 1779. He probably settled in Vienna in 1780, and suffered great poverty for about a year before he persuaded Emperor Joseph II to appoint him librettist of an Italian theatre company. In 1783 he met Mozart. Lorenzo Da Ponte's work on the libretti of operas by Mozart, Salieri and Martin i Soler made him the most important librettist of comic opera (opera buffa) in the 18th century. With his libretti, Mozart composed the operas The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Juan (1787) and All Such as These (1790). But Da Ponte's greatest success came with the triumph in Vienna of Martin i Solero's opera Una Cosa Rara (1787) (now out of production).
When Joseph II died in 1790, Da Ponte fell out of favour at the Imperial Palace, and was dismissed from his post. He and his wife moved to London, where he worked as a librettist at the Theatre Royal, and ran a bookshop and a printing press. He got into financial trouble when he bailed a cheque and was arrested at least 30 times in three months for debts. Fleeing his creditors, he moved to the USA in 1805, living in New York and Elizabethtown in New Jersey. His financial difficulties did not end there, as he worked as a poet, a salesman and a delivery man before taking a position as a teacher of Italian literature and language at Columbia College. Between 1823 and 1827 he published four volumes of Memoirs, in which he described himself mainly as a victim of fate and enemies. He was concerned with the popularisation of Italian opera. Lorenzo Da Ponte died on 17 August 1838.
