Download or read book The Man Who Wrote Mozart The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte written by Anthony Holden and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2024-06-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “During his picaresque, chameleon career, [Da Ponte] was always on the move. Jew and Catholic, priest and womaniser, poet and bankrupt, shopkeeper and university professor, he began his long life in and around Venice and ended it in New York. It is hard to imagine a more flamboyant personal history, a gift to the biographer Anthony Holden, who relishes his subject’s sheer exuberance.” — Lucasta Miller, The Guardian “Lorenzo da Ponte was, at various times, a Catholic priest, a gambler, a philanderer, an entrepreneur, a poet, a friend of Casanova, an enemy of the Venetian state, a teacher, a shopkeeper, a courtier and a troublemaker. The tangled yarn of his life would be worth spinning even had he not also written the libretto for Mozart’s three greatest operas. In The Man Who Wrote Mozart, Anthony Holden unravels the full nine decades of Da Ponte’s picaresque life, eight of which did not involve his friend Wolfgang... Holden’s narrative verve spans continents and centuries. His life of Da Ponte is engrossing and bound to be definitive.” — Rafael Behr, The Guardian “[T]he writer who evokes Mozart’s world most vividly - albeit obliquely - is the journalist and music critic Anthony Holden... Da Ponte’s life... is certainly a rollicking yarn... a riproaring read.” — Hugh Canning, Sunday Times “Anthony Holden writes extremely well, telling the racy story energetically... He provides a rattlingly good read, filled with vivid anecdotes.” — Spectator “Anthony Holden steers through this incredible picaresque story with elan, well paced gusto and a gentle, if not uncritical, eye... Anthony Holden’s book is a fine achievement.” — The Oldie “Anthony Holden’s... biography, brings assiduous new research to Da Ponte’s early and late life and tells his story in journalistic deadpan.” — The Tablet “Holden’s companionable new biography is a refreshing take on an old story.” — Mail on Sunday “[E]ntertaining.” — The Herald “He writes with a sincere enthusiasm about the creative partnership with Mozart.” — Sunday Telegraph “The trajectory of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s life was remarkable.” — London Review of Books “This is a tale of a literary adventurer, full of mystery... Holden does his readers a favour by making his subject interesting to an audience beyond opera lovers.” — Sunday Business Post “[A] genuine pleasure. At turns amusing, poignant and instructive, it engagingly captures the chemistry between librettist and composer that produced those masterpieces of the operatic repertoire.” — Irish Times “Phew! The only problem with this sparkling biography is keeping up with the headlong pace set by what was really an extraordinary life.” — Classic FM Magazine “Anything biographical or musical that Anthony Holden writes is automatically worth reading, and this exquisitely written book sees him discourse eruditely on both topics.” — Observer “Clear, impartial, accessible and concise.” — The Times “An enjoyable biography of a remarkable man.” — The Sunday Times “Anthony Holden’s compelling narrative does justice to the man and to the highs and lows of his unusually varied career.” — Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

Download or read book The Man who Wrote Mozart written by Anthony Holden and published by Orion. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1805, a 56-year-old Italian immigrant disembarked in Philadelphia carrying only a violin. Before dying in New York 23 years later, in his ninetieth year, he would find New World respectability as a bookseller, then as the first Professor of Italian at Columbia University. For now, he set up shop as a grocer. There was always an air of mystery about the Abbé Lorenzo da Ponte. A scholarly poet, teacher and priest, with a devoted wife, he also had a reputation as a womanizer. Da Ponte charmed all he met, pioneering the place of Italian music in American life. The many lives of Lorenzo da Ponte - librettist of Mozart's three great operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte - begin in Venice, linger in Vienna and London and finish in New York, where today he lies buried in an unmarked grave in the world's largest cemetery. --book jacket.

Download or read book Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte written by Lorenzo Da Ponte and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2000-05-31 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plot and counterplot lie at the heart of Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro, the three brilliant libretti that Lorenzo Da Ponte prepared for Mozart. They were also central to Da Ponte's own extraordinary life. His Memoirs record a fantastic variety of romantic, political, and professional intrigues, and tell of meetings with a host of remarkable men. In a life that took him from the canals of Venice to the streets of New York, Da Ponte was at different times priest, professional gambler, proprietor of a bordello, political agitator, court poet, impresario, grocery store owner, and the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. His Memoirs, a minor classic of Italian literature, are the picaresque and engrossing story of a man of enormous talent and unsurpassed flair who was, above all, an indefatigable survivor. "I shall speak of things . . . so singular in their oddity as in some manner to instruct, or at least entertain, without wearying." —Lorenzo da Ponte

Download or read book The Librettist of Venice written by Rodney Bolt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Lorenzo da Ponte written by Rodney Bolt and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time he was forty, Lorenzo Da Ponte had been a poet, priest, lover and libertine, a friend of Casanova, collaborator then enemy of Salieri, and ultimately the librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime operas - The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni. After losing all his money and the woman he loved he started afresh in New York, and by the end of his life he had founded its first opera house and become a university professor. Lorenzo Da Ponte is a fascinating and entertaining biography of a larger-than-life character, and a vibrant portrait of four cities and four changing eras of history.

Download or read book Lorenzo Da Ponte written by Sheila Hodges and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002-06-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mozart s Letters Mozart s Life written by Robert Spaethling and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-12-17 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wonderful collection that gives Mozart a voice as a son, husband, brother and friend." —New York Times Book Review "Mozart's honesty, his awareness of his own genius and his contempt for authority all shine out from these letters."—Sunday Times (London). " In Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, Robert Spaethling presents "Mozart in all the rawness of his driving energies" (Spectator), preserved in the "zany, often angry effervescence" of his writing (Observer). Where other translators have ignored Mozart's atrocious spelling and tempered his foul language, "Robert Spaethling's new translations are lively and racy, and do justice to Mozart's restlessly inventive mind" (Daily Mail). Carefully selected and meticulously annotated, this collection of letters "should be on the shelves of every music lover" (BBC Music Magazine).

Download or read book Mozart s Women written by Jane Glover and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mozart was fascinated, amused, aroused, hurt, and betrayed by women. He loved and respected them, composed for them, performed with them. This unique biography looks at his interaction with each, starting with his family (his mother, Maria Anna and beloved and talented sister, Nannerl), and his marriage (which brought his 'other family', the Weber sisters). His relationships with his artists are examined, in particular those of his operas, through whose characters Mozart gave voice to the emotions of women who were, like his entire female acquaintance, restrained by the conventions and structures of eighteenth-century society. This is their story as well as his -- and shows once again that a great part of the composer’s genius was in his understanding and musical expression of human nature. Evocative and beautifully written, Mozart’s Women illuminates the music, the man, and above all the women who inspired him. 'Jane Glover has pulled off a coup des livres with her fresh take on Mozart's life and work’ Sunday Telegraph ‘Readable, informative and moving...Her passion for the music shines through this touching, vividly told story' Sunday Times

Download or read book Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte written by Lorenzo Da Ponte and published by . This book was released on 1983-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Hero of Our Own written by Sheila Isenberg and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fry was the American Schindler with desperate exiles, menacing Nazis, forged documents and midnight escapes [think] Casablanca." -New York Times Varian Fry, the only American honored at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, was a young New Yorker who rescued more than 1,500 Europeans from the Nazi's including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and other intellectuals, political activists, and "degenerative" artists, many of them Jews. This moving Holocaust rescue story is set against the backdrop of American isolationism and anti-Semitism. "The drama here is in the thrill of rescue, the realistic portrait of a complex leader, and the decidedly nonheroic truths about WWII at home." -American Library Association "One of the BEST BOOKS of 2001" -St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Download or read book Le nozze di Figaro written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Wells introduces the opera with a high-spirited account of the action-packed career of the author, in many respects the prototype of Figaro himself. Basil Deane explores the score: he shows that Mozart's characters are illuminated here not so much in soliloquies but in their reactions to each other. Composer Stephen Oliver discusses how the comedy exists not just in the words but, essentially, in the music. The full Italian text is given, with a note on the order of scenes in Act Three and the alternative passages Mozart wrote for the 1789 revival. The classic translation of E.J. Dent is an excellent way to get to know the twists and turns of the plot and the stylish wit of da Ponte's innuendos.Contents: A Society Marriage, John Wells; A Musical Commentary, Basil Deane; Music and Comedy in 'The Marriage of Figaro, Stephen Oliver; Beaumarchais's Characters; Le nozze di Figaro: Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte; The Marriage of Figaro: English version by Edward J. Dent

Download or read book Meeting Mozart written by Howard Jay Smith and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meeting Mozart is a rich historical novel that spans generations and brings to light the incredible life story of Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Jewish-born priest.

Download or read book Mozart written by Paul Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent historian Paul Johnson dazzles with a rich, succinct portrait of Mozart and his music As he’s done in Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus, and Darwin, acclaimed historian and author Paul Johnson here offers a concise, illuminating biography of Mozart. Johnson’s focus is on the music—Mozart’s wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart’s gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of them except the harp. For example, no sooner had the clarinet been invented and introduced than Mozart began playing and composing for it. In addition to his many insights into Mozart’s music, Johnson also challenges the many myths that have followed Mozart, including those about the composer’s health, wealth, religion, and relationships. Always engaging, Johnson offers readers and music lovers a superb examination of Mozart and his glorious music, which is still performed every day in concert halls and opera houses around the world.

Download or read book The Figaro Murders written by Laura Lebow and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1786 Vienna, Lorenzo Da Ponte is the court librettist for the Italian Theatre during the height of the enlightened reign of Emperor Joseph II. This exalted position doesn't mean he's particularly well paid, or even out of reach of the endless intrigues of the opera world. In fact, far from it. One morning, Da Ponte stops off at his barber, only to find the man being taken away to debtor's prison. Da Ponte impetuously agrees to carry a message to his barber's fiancée and try to help her set him free, even though he's facing pressures of his own. He's got one week to finish the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro for Mozart before the opera is premiered for the Emperor himself. Da Ponte visits the house where the barber's fiancée works—the home of a nobleman, high in the Vienna's diplomatic circles—and then returns to his own apartments, only to be dragged from his rooms in the middle of the night. It seems the young protégé of the diplomat was killed right about the time Da Ponte was visiting, and he happens to be their main suspect. Now he's given a choice—go undercover into the household and uncover the murderer, or be hanged for the crime himself. Brilliantly recreating the cultural world of late 18th century Vienna, the epicenter of the Enlightenment, Lebow brings to life some of the most famous figures of music, theatre, and politics.

Download or read book Lorenzo Da Ponte written by April Fitzlyon and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the revised edition of April FitzLyon's celebrated biography of Mozart's librettist, who provided the brilliant, witty texts for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte. Born a Jew in the Republic of Venice, Da Ponte became a Christian before involving himself in political and amorous intrigue and having to flee, like his friend Casanova, to Vienna, pursued by both the Inquisition and jealous husbands. As court poet to Joseph II he succeeded Metastasio and worked with many composers, until his escapades forced him to move on to London, where he managed the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. After a series of financial disasters, he moved to New York, where he worked several jobs before becoming a professor at Columbia. He helped to introduce Italian opera to the USA and in old age wrote his notoriously unreliable memoirs.This fascinating portrait provides a colourful picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in four capitals, combining musical and literary history with an account of the social life of the period.

Download or read book Mozart written by Jan Swafford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.

Download or read book Daniel Sickles A Life written by Garry Boulard and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The name Daniel Sickles and the word controversy are synonymous. Any student of 19th century American political history is familiar with Sickles’ 1859 murder of Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, who had seduced Sickles’ young wife. That murder, because Sickles was at the time a New York Congressman and Key a district attorney for Washington, captured the country’s imagination, a front-page event that inevitably ensnarled President James Buchanan, a close Sickles friend, inviting in the process explorations of what was seen as a sordid Washington society of the late 1850s. Civil War historians know Sickles as the General who led the men of the Union’s III Corps out onto the exposed expanse of the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, a decision many scholars have regarded as disastrous, and one that nearly led to an overall Union defeat at the famous battlefield, while losing for Sickles his right leg from Confederate shelling. But these two singular, if spectacular events, in a very real sense represent only two days out of an extraordinary lifetime of 94 years. The rest of Sickles’ career was made up of his rise as a young stalwart of New York’s notorious Tammany Hall; his two terms in Congress leading up to the Civil War; his contentious service as a military governor of the Carolinas after the War; his newsworthy tenure as U.S. Minister to Spain in the late 1860s and early 70s; and even his stint, at the age of 70, as the sheriff of the county encompassing New York City. Beyond the headlines were Sickles’ relationships with presidents ranging from Franklin Pierce to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, not to mention an improbable friendship with Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century. Daniel Sickles: A Life is the first full-length published treatment looking in depth at the entirely of one man’s almost unbelievably colorful and contentious career. Garry Boulard is the author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse, 2006), and The Worst President—The Story of James Buchanan (iUniverse, 2015). Boulard’s essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of Ethnic Studies, Louisiana History, Journal of Mississippi History, and Florida Historical Quarterly, among many other publications.