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Lorenzo da Ponte (2002)

One of my favorite tricky questions for literary colleagues is this: Who was the most prominent Sephardic poet ever in America? Since few can identify any, I give a clue: He was a professor at Columbia University. Still no answer? He wrote mostly in Italian. Still none? It was in the early 19 th century. Even then few can figure, even though they know his name once I reveal it.

Remembered primarily at the librettist for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lorenzo Da Ponte was also an influential, if hidden, figure in American cultural history. Born Emanuele Conegliano to Jewish parents in Italy in 1749, the year before J.S. Bach died, he adopted at fourteen the complete name of the local bishop who sent him and his bright brothers to high school otherwise closed to Jews. After significant and adventurous sojourns in Venice, Vienna, and London, reflecting a taste for what we would now call risky behavior, he immigrated to America around 1805, becoming in New York a teacher of Italian, a dealer in Italian books, and incidentally the co-founder of one of the first opera companies here. In 1825, at the age of 76, he was appointed a professor of Italian at Columbia University, becoming an American citizen three years later. An Italian theater poet to his death in 1838, he continually spelled his most distinguished collaborator’s name as “Mozzart,” which makes sense in Italian but not in German or English.

The first virtue of this biography by Sheila Hodges, a retired British publisher, is recalling Da Ponte’s other activities, initially as the writer of a memoir from which she repeatedly quotes, probably because it is so elegant, even in English translation. “As soon as the [musicians’] parts were distributed, all hell was let loose. Some of the singers had too many recitatives, some not enough; one had an aria which was too low, another one which was too high; some of them did not sing in the ensembles, other sang in them too much; one singer was sacrificed to the prima donna, another took second fiddle to the first, second, third, and fourth buffi; there were endless fireworks.” If Da Ponte apparently had any significant Jewish friends, Hodges doesn’t mention them, though frequently noting that others thought him Jewish, his conversion notwithstanding.

Though few Italian immigrants to the U.S. wrote so much distinguished poetry, I don’t recall his work appearing in any anthology of Italian-American poetry. Nor does it appear in any anthology of Jewish-American poetry or even Sephardic-American writing known to me. All this is lamentable, because, before his time in more ways than one, he ranks among the greats.