Jewish origins of Mozart’s librettist a ‘poorly kept secret’
One of the most important librettists, or authors of operatic texts, in music history, was born Jewish, but his origins weren’t known widely until the Nazis banned works of Jewish artists during the Holocaust.
A sign in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, noting Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the libretti for 28 operas, including three of Mozart’s. Credit: Rosemarie Mosteller/Shutterstock.
In recent years, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Jewish background has been so taken for granted that biographies tend to downplay or overlook it again.
That’s according to an article on Da Ponte (1749-1838) by Robert Marshall, music professor emeritus at Brandeis University, that appeared in March in the journal Music and Musical Performance.
“If a modern music lover knows anything at all about” Da Ponte, who wrote the libretti to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, “it is likely to be that he was born a Jew,” Marshall wrote.
“A particularly well-informed enthusiast will also know that he converted to Catholicism, was ordained as a priest and, after an unusually turbulent and colourful existence, eventually landed in America where he spent his last decades as, among other things, the first professor of Italian at Columbia College,” now Columbia University, per the article.
“Da Ponte’s Jewish origin was not generally known before the 20th century,” Marshall added. “How the fact was handled over the centuries constitutes a history of concealment, rumour, discovery, denigration and exploitation.”
The nature of that concealment varied. It is unclear if Mozart knew that his librettist had Jewish origins, and Da Ponte evidently went to lengths to conceal his own Jewish background. “I shall speak but little of my family, my neighbourhood, my early years, as of matters … of the scant moment to the reader,” the librettist wrote in his memoirs. “I was born on the 10th day of March in the year 1749 in Ceneda, a small but not obscure city of the Venetian state.”
Lorenzo da Ponte Pic: Wikipedia
“When I was five years old, my mother died. Fathers, as a rule, give little heed to the early years of their children,” Da Ponte wrote.
The librettist gave little heed to his Jewish identity, although Marshall assumes that he was circumcised as a child and had a bar mitzvah celebration. He was baptised soon after the latter and later became a Roman Catholic priest.
Marshall thinks it’s possible that the Habsburg emperor Joseph II—Da Ponte’s most important patron—knew that the librettist was Jewish.
“He was a particular favourite of Joseph II, who had appointed him (instead of other ambitious aspirants) poet of the newly revived Italian court opera beginning with the April 1783 season,” Marshall wrote. “Just a year earlier, on Jan. 2, 1782, Joseph had issued his Edict of Tolerance that emancipated the Jews of Vienna and allowed them to practice their faith openly.”
“Could it be that Joseph was aware of, or at least suspected, Da Ponte’s Jewish origins and this fact had predisposed the enlightened despot in favour of the newly arrived and quite inexperienced poet?” Marshall wrote.
Less than a month after the premiere of Così fan tutte, Joseph II died on Feb. 20, 1790, and the new emperor, Leopold II “proved to be just as antagonistic to the poet as Joseph had been benevolent,” Marshall wrote. Da Ponte lost his post in the court and, soon thereafter, was pushed out of Vienna. He fled, bankrupt, to the United States in 1805 and remained stateside for the rest of his life.
In the decades after Mozart died in 1791, biographies of the 35-year-old prodigy don’t mention Da Ponte, let alone the librettist’s Jewish origins, according to Marshall. He credits the first reference to Da Ponte’s Jewish background in a book about Mozart to an 1826 volume, which calls it a rumour. (There had been prior antisemitic references to Da Ponte’s origins.)
Da Ponte acknowledged his Jewish origins in a single letter, perhaps penned in 1785 but published in 1788. The librettist wrote that his enemies said, “Let him be crucified. … Let us stick him back in the ghetto, whence came his guilty race,” Marshall noted. (Da Ponte referred in his memoirs at one point to “the fat-pursed descendants of Abraham.”)
Marshall speculates that childhood acquaintances, who “remembered his baptism ceremony and had followed his later rise to fame,” may have spread the rumours about Da Ponte’s Jewish origins. Or, the “admitted libertine and seducer” Da Ponte “may have been betrayed, inadvertently or deliberately, by one (or more) of his paramours—women with literally intimate knowledge of the true state of affairs,” Marshall writes.
As Marshall tells it, Da Ponte’s Jewish background wasn’t well known until the turn of the 20th century. It was “completely familiar to the classical music public” by the time the Nazis assumed power, after which both Da Ponte’s libretti and Hermann Levi’s translations of them into German posed problems for Nazi audiences that wanted nothing to do with works that reflected Jewish artistry.
Performers were reluctant to learn new translations of famous Mozart works, Marshall wrote. Opera halls tended to erase Da Ponte’s name from Mozart programs or opted to “acknowledge his existence but to denigrate his character and his talent, asserting that the operas owed their greatness exclusively to the brilliance of the music.” (After the war, German opera houses tended to perform operas in their original language.)
In the decades after World War II, some biographies treated Da Ponte’s Jewish origins snidely. But then, the librettist’s Jewish story seesawed again.
“In more recent decades some important publications, once again, are silent about Da Ponte’s Jewish roots—not, this time, because the facts were unknown but, on the contrary,” Marshall wrote. “Because they were so well known that they could be taken for granted.”
“Da Ponte himself has captured the imagination of posterity. One wonders whether any other librettist active before the 20th century has received so much posthumous attention,” Marshall wrote.
“After countless previous incarnations—Jew by birth, Catholic convert and priest, adventurer, libertine, classicist, poet, bookseller, grocer, pedagogue, professor, impresario—Lorenzo Da Ponte has assumed one last identity,” he added. “The gifted writer of opera texts is no longer relegated to play forever, like Leporello to Don Giovanni, a supporting role in the life of the immortal Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has, finally, become the leading protagonist in his own right.”
JNS
How very interesting. Thankful contrast to sad event in Gaza.