Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the words to Mozart's three supreme Italian operas. He never lived in Salzburg, but in his memoirs he called Mozart "the miracle that God let be born in Salzburg." No phrase better captures the city's claim on the composer's genius.
The Story
Lorenzo da Ponte's connection to Salzburg is entirely through Mozart, and that is connection enough. Born into a Jewish family in northern Italy and converted to Catholicism as a young man, da Ponte was eventually ordained a priest, then exiled from Venice for scandalous conduct, then expelled from Vienna after Mozart's death. He lived a life of continuous upheaval. Through it all, his three years of collaboration with Mozart in Vienna produced something permanent.
He arrived in Vienna around 1781 and was appointed court poet by Emperor Joseph II. His first major success was not with Mozart but with the Spanish composer Martín y Soler, whose Una cosa rara became the sensation of 1786. Then came Le nozze di Figaro that same year, then Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787, then Cosi fan tutte in Vienna in 1790. Three libretti in five years, all for the same composer, each one a masterpiece. No other poet in history has collaborated with a composer at that level of sustained intensity and result.
Da Ponte wrote in his memoirs with evident feeling about his first encounter with Mozart at a Viennese salon. He described the composer as "the miracle that God let be born in Salzburg," a phrase that locates the origin of genius firmly in the city. That sentence is the thread that connects da Ponte to Introducing Salzburg: he is the man who most clearly named what Salzburg had produced.
After Mozart's death, da Ponte's Viennese career collapsed. He spent years in London, then eventually emigrated to the United States, where he built an unlikely second life as the first Professor of Italian at Columbia University, founding the city's first Italian opera company and dying in New York in 1838 at the age of 89. The librettist who gave Mozart his words outlived the composer by nearly fifty years.
