‘The Librettist of Venice:’ Mozart’s Poet

VPM | By Renee Montagne

Published July 28, 2006 at 5:07 PM EDT

Updated July 6, 2023

In this year of celebrations marking Mozart’s 250th birthday, we take a few moments to remember the great composer’s poet.

Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote the librettos for three of Mozart’s operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte.

And Lorenzo Da Ponte’s life played out like a character in the opera buffa of his day:

Born in 1749 into the Jewish ghetto of Venice, he converted to Christianity as a youth, entered the priesthood, and then matched his friend, Casanova, in a string of seductions scandalous even by the standards of a thoroughly decadent Venice.

Sent into exile, Da Ponte landed in Vienna at the court of Emperor Joseph II. Rodney Bolt, the author of a new biography, The Librettist of Venice, says Da Ponte’s timing couldn’t have been better.

“Joseph II had just created an Italian opera company,” Bolt says. “This would have been the center of Europe, and in that sense, the center of the world, as far as opera went.”

The company was among the most prestigious and one of the best paid. Da Ponte talks his way into the role of theater poet “without ever having written an opera in his life — not even a play.”

“He seems all the way through his life to have had the most extraordinary charm,” Bolt says.

Bolt says Da Ponte helped bring Mozart’s works to life. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the famous “Catalog Song” from Don Giovanni, in which the title character’s servant lists the number of women his master has seduced:

In Italy six hundred and forty / In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one. / A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one, / But in Spain already a thousand three.

Da Ponte seemed to know what Mozart wanted to say, Bolt says, “and the music almost comes out of the words in themselves.”

Tags

NPR News

Renee Montagne

Renee Montagne, one of the best-known names in public radio, is a special correspondent and host for NPR News.

Montagne's most recent assignment was a yearlong collaboration with ProPublica reporter Nina Martin, investigating the alarming rate of maternal mortality in the U.S., as compared to other developed countries. The series, called "Lost Mothers," was recognized with more than a dozen awards in American journalism, including a Peabody Award, a George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Journalism. The series was also named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

From 2004 to 2016, Montagne co-hosted NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the United States. Her first experience as host of an NPR newsmagazine came in 1987, when she, along with Robert Siegel, were named the new hosts of All Things Considered.

After leaving All Things Considered, Montagne traveled to South Africa in early 1990, arriving to report from there on the day Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison. In 1994, she and a small team of NPR reporters were awarded an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for their coverage of South Africa's historic elections that led to Mandela becoming that country's first black president.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Montagne has made 10 extended reporting trips to Afghanistan. She has traveled to every major city, from Kabul to Kandahar, to peaceful villages, and to places where conflict raged. She has profiled Afghanistan's presidents and power brokers, but focused on the stories of Afghans at the heart of that complex country: school girls, farmers, mullahs, poll workers, midwives, and warlords. Her coverage has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, and, for stories on Afghan women in particular, by the Gracie Awards.

One of her most cherished honors dates to her days as a freelance reporter in the 1980s, when Montagne and her collaborator, the writer Thulani Davis, were awarded "First Place in Radio" by the National Association of Black Journalists for their series "Fanfare for the Warriors." It told the story of African-American musicians in the military bands from WW1 to Vietnam.

Montagne began her career in radio pretty much by accident, when she joined a band of friends, mostly poets and musicians, who were creating their own shows at a new, scrappy little San Francisco community station called KPOO. Her show was called Women's Voices.

Montagne graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley. Her career includes teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism (now the Carter Institute).

See stories by Renee Montagne