Certainly the greatest of Mozart’s operas were the three operas that he wrote with the poet-librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Da Ponte was a fascinating character, and he had many careers during his extremely long life. He was a priest, a poet, a philosopher, a stage director, a professor of languages, and at one point he was even a grocer. Let's take a closer look at this fascinating character.
Da Ponte was born Emanuele Canigliano in the Jewish sector of Venice, now the Vittorio Veneto. After the early death of his mother, his father, wanting to marry a young Catholic woman, insisted on having the whole family convert to the Catholic faith so that they could all worship together. He also insisted that his three sons all become priests in thanksgiving to God for what he considered the blessing of this marriage. So the young Lorenzo (so named to honor the bishop who brought them into the faith) went into training and indeed, became a priest. But according to his journal, Lorenzo felt that there was only one vocation that he felt he was completely unsuited for, and that was the priesthood! The problem was that he was a very free thinker during a time when the church didn’t appreciate that kind of thinking. And he was constantly falling in love with beautiful women, something else the church didn’t really appreciate in its priests. He was eventually run out of Venice for his bad behavior, left the priesthood and began to wander through Europe looking for a home. He spent some time in Dresden working with Caterino Mazzolà translating and arranging libretti and eventually landed in Vienna where he not only became the royal playwright, but met Mozart and began to collaborate on those three wonderful operas for which they are now world famous. (Early during his stay in Vienna, Da Ponte had the opportunity to meet the earlier great librettist of the day, Pietro Metastasio, who approved of the younger man's verses and praised him before the court.)
It is interesting to wonder how Mozart and Da Ponte were able to get along. These were, after all, two geniuses, one in music the other in poetry and theatre, great artists each in their own right and both with very large egos. But from everything we know from Da Ponte's autobiography it must have gone rather smoothly. After all Da Ponte understood music very well, and Mozart understood poetry very well. There is every reason to believe that they worked very closely together on these operas, each artist making certain demands on the other as the process unfolded, and most certainly making compromises along the way. Mozart mentions Da Ponte only once in his correspondence, not with much flattery, in a letter to his father dated May 7, 1783: "Our poet here is now a certain Abbate Da Ponte. He has an enormous amount to do in revising pieces for the theatre and he has to write per obbligo an entirely new libretto for Salieri, which will take him two months. He has promised after that to write a new libretto for me. But who knows whether he will be able to keep his word -- or will want to? For, as you are aware, these Italian gentlemen are very civil to your face. Enough, we know them! If he is in league with Salieri, I shall never get anything out of him! But indeed I should dearly love to show what I can do in an Italian opera!"
After his collaboration with Mozart and other composers (Martin y Soler and Salieri among them) in Vienna Da Ponte lived in London, where he managed the King's Theatre, Haymarket and married an Englishwoman, Nancy Grahl. Having to declare bankruptcy in 1800 he and his growing family left London for New York in 1805 where he was involved in many different occupations. But he was the first teacher of Italian and the classics at Columbia University and helped build the first Italian opera house in New York City where he acted briefly as manager. He died in 1838 at the ripe old age of 89.
Così fan tutte is the only opera that Mozart wrote which is not based on some other source like an event from history, or a play or a novel. Even his other two operas with Da Ponte were based on earlier sources…The Marriage of Figaro was based on the French play Le mariage du Figaro by Beaumarchais (written only a few years before the premiere of the opera), and Don Giovanni was based on the old Spanish story about Don Juan, the famous lover, and which during Mozart’s lifetime had been traveling around Europe as a puppet play. But Così fan tutte, although the story had roots in classical literature, was a completely original story. There's been a rumor ever since the opera was written in 1790 that the plot was based on something that actually happened in the royal court of the Hapsburg family at the time of the premiere in 1790, but there is no evidence to support this theory. If it is true, when the opera was finally performed the royals in the audience must have had a field day trying to figure out who was who, and what was what
If one is new to this opera, the title takes a bit of explaining. Così fan tutte means “All women are like that”, referring to Don Alfonso's belief that the women (Fiordiligi and Dorabella) will be proven unfaithful and, ultimately, that all women are flighty, superficial and incapable of fidelity. This is a harsh judgment that cannot be measured against contemporary standards. And it must be accepted that the women are entrapped, tricked and put in a very unfair position. But the title is misleading. If one pays close attention to what happens at the end of the opera, no one comes out of this story squeaky clean. At the end, everyone has egg on their faces, not just the women but the men as well. This author prefers the sub-title provided by Da Ponte and Mozart: they called it “The School for Lovers”. There’s a lot to be learned from this opera about relationships, about the constant struggle between the sexes and how to laugh at yourself, how to ‘keep things light’ when you think you’ve fallen in love. Mozart and Da Ponte succeed in getting us to laugh at our imperfections and that, of course, is the essence of comedy.