The Librettist of Venice

The Librettist of Venice PDF

Author: Rodney Bolt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-12-11

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 1596919825

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In 1805, Lorenzo Da Ponte was the proprietor of a small grocery store in New York. But since his birth into an Italian Jewish family in 1749, he had already been a priest, a poet, the lover of many women, a scandalous Enlightenment thinker banned from teaching in Venice, the librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime operas, a collaborator with Salieri, a friend of Casanova, and a favorite of Emperor Joseph II. He would go on to establish New York City's first opera house and be the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. An inspired innovator but a hopeless businessman, who loved with wholehearted loyalty and recklessness, Da Ponte was one of the early immigrants to live out the American dream. In Rodney Bolt's rollicking and extensively researched biography, Da Ponte's picaresque life takes readers from Old World courts and the back streets of Venice, Vienna, and London to the New World promise of New York City. Two hundred and fifty years after Mozart's birth, the life and legacy of his librettist Da Ponte are as astonishing as ever.

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte PDF

Author: Sheila Hodges

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2002-06-15

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0299178730

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Three of the greatest operas ever written—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—join the exquisite music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte’s own long life (1749–1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet, and librettist of genius who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became professor of Italian at Columbia University—wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III’s London to New York City.

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice PDF

Author: Ellen Rosand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-10-09

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 0520254260

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"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers—producing the art form that was soon to sweep the world and that has been dominant ever since—are revealed in their first freshness."—Andrew Porter "This will be a standard work on the subject of the rise of Venetian opera for decades. Rosand has provided a decisive contribution to the reshaping of the entire subject. . . . She offers a profoundly new view of baroque opera based on a solid documentary and historical-critical foundation. The treatment of the artistic self-consciousness and professional activities of the librettists, impresarios, singers, and composers is exemplary, as is the examination of their reciprocal relations. This work will have a positive effect not only on studies of 17th-century, but on the history of opera in general."—Lorenzo Bianconi

Memoirs

Memoirs PDF

Author: Lorenzo Da Ponte

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Published: 2000-05-31

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13:

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The memoirs of the man who wrote the libretti for three of Mozart's best operas.

Venice Observed

Venice Observed PDF

Author: Mary McCarthy

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1963

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780156935210

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A penetrating work of reportage on Venice. "Searching observations and astonishing comprehension of the Venetian taste and character" (New York Herald Tribune).

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte PDF

Author: Rodney Bolt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780747580140

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In 1805, the year that Wordsworth completedThe Preludeand Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar, Lorenzo da Ponte opened a grocery shop in New York. In the first forty years of his life had been poet, priest, lover, libertine, collaborator with Salieri, librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime operas, friend of Casanova, and a favourite of Emperor Joseph II. By the end of his life he would have founded New York's first opera house and become the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. Da Ponte lived through the period when opera came of age - when he was born, Handel was all the rage; if he had survived four more years he could have witnessed Wagner's debut - and he plotted and schemed his way through the opera worlds of both London and Vienna. This was a man who converted from Judaism to Christianity, took the cloth, was banished twice from Venice once for scandalous behaviour, and later for scurrilous versifying, who was an inspired innovator but a hopeless businessman, and who loved with wholehearted loyalty and recklessness.

Prokofiev's Soviet Operas

Prokofiev's Soviet Operas PDF

Author: Nathan Seinen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 110708878X

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Offers a critical and contextual study of the last four operas of Prokofiev, the leading opera composer in Stalin's Soviet Union.

Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte

Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte PDF

Author: Lorenzo Da Ponte

Publisher:

Published: 1983-07

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780844619453

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1929. Edited and annotated by Arthur Livingston. The fascinating memoirs of the Italian poet, librettist, and pioneer in spreading Italian culture in the United States. Forced to leave Venice and Vienna due to scandals, he wandered through Europe, lived in London and then came to the US where he spent the rest of his life as a celebrated teacher of Italian language and culture (except for an unsuccessful period spent in Pennsylvania selling medicines). He taught nearly 2,000 private pupils and was appointed professor of Italian language and literature at Columbia in 1830.

The Singing Turk

The Singing Turk PDF

Author: Larry Wolff

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-08-30

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0804799652

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While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.