The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, a handsome, lavishly produced volume, offers easy access to all the information most music lovers will need about a favourite composer, but its weighty, in-depth comprehensiveness comes at a hefty price, and most Mozartians may content themselves with Nicholas Kenyon’s modestly priced but still informed and informative Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart (£8.99), which concentrates on the masterpieces we are most likely to encounter in the concert hall and opera house (it can easily be carried around in a reasonably capacious pocket).

These are all fine books by scholarly authors, but the writer who evokes Mozart’s world most vividly — albeit obliquely — is the journalist and music critic Anthony Holden in his slightly opportunistically entitled The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte. It’s a cheeky wheeze, for Da Ponte, whose long life, as Holden points out, spanned the eras of Handel and Wagner (he was born near Treviso in 1749, and died in New York in 1838), worked with Mozart for a mere five years, from 1785-90. Their collaboration as poet-librettist and composer, however, produced three of the most enduring masterpieces of the operatic stage, the sublime comedies The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Although we would know little — and probably care less — about the baptised, initially illiterate Jewish lad from a provincial Italian town if fate had not brought him into the proximity of the most phenomenal genius music has ever known, Holden rightly points out that the operatic works Mozart and Da Ponte produced together far surpassed those they each produced with other men. His inference, although there is sadly little documentation to prove it, is that Da Ponte’s “genius” — if such it was — served as a catalyst to the even more powerful theatrical imagination of Mozart and stimulated it in a way that his other librettists could not.

The Mozart episode in Da Ponte’s biography occupies the three central chapters of Holden’s well-structured and racily related book. What The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia discreetly describes as Da Ponte’s picaresque life — gleaned, it has to be admitted, as Holden frequently does, from the writer’s notoriously unreliable and self-aggrandising memoirs — is filled out with sometimes salacious detail and evident relish by the journalist-critic. Da Ponte’s early life occasionally reads here like an Age of Enlightenment soft-porn novel, as the roving eyes and hands of the voluptuous priest are caught in flagrante by outraged landladies, husbands and lovers, and Da Ponte, like Casanova, flees gambling debtors, rivals and even the oppressive laws of licentious 18th-century Venice, to continue his career as a “poet” and philanderer. (Eventually, at the age of 43, and apparently to his own surprise, he meets a Jewish-English girl 20 years his junior, with whom he spends the rest of his life even though it is by no means certain that they married.)

Da Ponte’s life — if we take his memoirs at face value — is certainly a rollicking yarn. He was a friend and admirer of the 18th century’s most celebrated Don Juan figure, Giacomo Casanova, and Holden implies that Da Ponte saw himself as a younger version of the famous womaniser, to the extent that his depiction of Don Giovanni may have autobiographical resonances. Holden doesn’t labour the point, however, and the romances and conquests, though possibly exaggerated and self-deluding (one might say the same of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don), are there for all to see. Holden obviously identifies with his subject, even though he isn’t blind to his faults: his love of intrigue, his paranoia about cabals, his cavalier attitude to unwanted pregnancies (his illegitimate children, when he was a priest in Venice, were casually handed to orphanages).

Surprisingly, for a translator of opera into English and propagandist for surtitles, Holden assumes a knowledge of languages, leaving several quotations untranslated. Occasionally he glosses over well-known facts to make his point: his commendation of Da Ponte for delaying the entrance of the prima donna (meaning the countess) of Figaro until Act II, for example, begs a few questions. Only since the middle of the 20th century has this role been considered the most significant female character. Both Mozart and Da Ponte would have regarded the maidservant Susanna as their star — indeed, Nancy Storace, the first singer of the role and the leading lady of the Viennese opera troupe when Figaro was first performed, switched roles from aristocrat to chamber-maid, when it became clear that the latter role had become the linchpin of the drama. And Queen Marie-Antoinette, ill-fated sister of Da Ponte’s patron, Emperor Joseph II, went to the guillotine in 1793, not 1792, as Holden suggests.

I don’t want to nitpick, however, as Da Ponte’s story is a rip-roaring read. Holden takes us on a whistle-stop tour through the backstreets of London and New York, pinpointing the unlikely places where “the man who wrote Mozart” plied his trades, finally as grocer, Italian language teacher and opera impresario to Manhattan high society in the early 19th century.

Available at Books First prices of £17.09 (Holden), £22.50 (Sadie) and £85.50 on 0870 165 8585

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