A thorough, well-rendered account of Da Ponte’s unique talents.
Lively biography of the Italian librettist of Mozart’s three most famous operas emphasizes his restless desire for distinction.
Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) insinuated himself into the elite cultural life of Venice, Vienna, London and New York through the sheer force of his energy, talent and boldness, avers Bolt (History Play, 2005). Born to Jewish parents in the State of Venice, Da Ponte converted to Christianity and seized the new opportunity for education and patronage by becoming a priest, a gifted teacher of seminarians and a poet capable of remarkable improvisations to the accompaniment of a violin or harpsichord. An affair with a married woman forced him into exile in music-mad Vienna; there, under the protection of Emperor Joseph II, he became poet to the court theatre and the newly established Italian opera company. He collaborated with Salieri, Martín y Soler and most memorably with Mozart; Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte are still staples of today’s repertory. Bolt is at his best examining this high point of Da Ponte’s life, taking us behind the scenes to dissect not only the composition of the operas but also the politicking, backbiting and pettiness of all those involved in this collaborative art. The withdrawal of royal patronage, a new emperor and some political intrigue led to his departure for London, where the vogue for all things Italian meant money to support his new wife and his many siblings still in Venice. As the impresario of the King’s Theatre, he rewrote operas to suit the unsophisticated English audience’s taste. Bad business deals reduced him to bookselling and finally to fleeing for New York to escape his debts. In the New World for his last 32 years, Da Ponte pieced together a life as a grocer, bookseller and teacher (Columbia’s first professor of Italian), serving as Italy’s informal cultural ambassador.
A thorough, well-rendered account of Da Ponte’s unique talents.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-59691-118-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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