From Publishers Weekly
A literary biography in the form of verse, Slavitt's long poem chronicles the life of Lorenzo da Ponte, an obscure writer of vast ambition and frequent failure whose only enduring works are the several librettos he wrote for Mozart. Featuring a cast of characters including Casanova, Emperor Joseph II, Clement Moore (the author of "The Night Before Christmas") and, of course, Amadeus himself, Slavitt's poem succeeds both as literary history and as verse. Da Ponte's story, while largely a series of disappointments, is as crammed with incident as a picaresque novel. From the twists and turns of da Ponte's unhappy life, Slavitt takes off on meditations of the curious routes of fate: "Like a mother,/ a run of good luck will sicken, die,/ and leave you/ orphaned,/ renamed,/ unselfed,/ undone." As da Ponte struggles with his own mediocrity and the malign jockeying for position intrinsic to the patronage system, Slavitt presents a highly sympathetic portrait of a man grappling with his own limitations: "There are only disimprovements now/ in body and spirit, a settling/ for what is,/ a recognition that this ill-fitting garment/ is what the wardrobe holds."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Here's a poem for opera buffs, for its subject is Lorenzo da Ponte (1749^-1838), librettist for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosifan tutte. His long life was stuffed with the picaresque. Born a Jew, he was opportunistically converted by his father and early and insincerely became a priest but was, also early, a rake who knew Casanova and a never-quite-successful theatrical writer-impresario. He eventually married and emigrated to America, winding up his days teaching at Columbia College in New York and translating Byron's mordant "Prophecy of Dante" into Italian. Slavitt rehearses this colorful life melancholically, for his vantage on it is da Ponte's old age, when da Ponte clearly sees that its high points were a young-lust affair with a woman whose language he could not speak (nor she his) and his collaboration with Mozart. Cast in a quick-moving approximation of blank verse (rhyme is used only to twit Mozart, who disliked it), this poetic biography is just the thing to read before curtain's rise. Ray Olson
