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Home > Composers Datebook > Da Ponte (and Mozart) in New York


	Podcast:		Composers Datebook
	Episode:		Da Ponte (and Mozart) in New York
	Category:		Health
	Duration:		00:01:59
	Publish Date:		2018-05-23 00:00:00
	Description:		In 1805, a 56-year-old Italian man of letters immigrated to America. Now, there wasn’t much call for Italian men of letters in America in those days, so over the next twenty years, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, he was, by turns, a grocer, distiller, seller of patent medicines, and owner of a dry goods shop. Eventually he was offered an honorary – that is to say unsalaried – position as Professor of Italian at Columbia University. In 1825, a troupe of Italian opera singers visited New York, and our Italian friend attended their performances. He introduced himself to the head of the troupe, the famous singer, Manuel Garcia, who was astonished to learn the elderly Italian gentleman was none other than Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s operas, “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Cosi fan tutte,” and “Don Giovanni.” And so it came about, that on today’s date in 1826, that the American premiere of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” was given in New York City, with Garcia in the title role, in the presence of the man who had penned the opera’s libretto almost forty years earlier, a 77-year old American citizen named Lorenzo da Ponte. Fanciful as it seems, it’s a true story. But to indulge in fantasy for a moment, let’s pretend that Mozart did not die in Vienna in 1791, and had instead immigrated to America. Mozart would have been 70 in 1826, and could easily have been sitting beside his old friend da Ponte at the American premiere of THEIR “Don Giovanni!”
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