Mozart’s Rabbi

Lorenzo Da Ponte, poet, scholar, librettist and self-proclaimed champion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, finds himself at the end of the eighteenth century a financial and artistic failure. A conversation with his friend Casanova inspires him to restore both his fortune and reputation in America. After a dispiriting voyage he lands in New York and in a bookshop on Broadway meets and befriends Clement Moore, influential clergyman and future author of Night Before Christmas. Moore introduces his foreign genius to culture-starved New Yorkers to whom Da Ponte recalls his experiences, professional and personal, of Mozart. With Moore as his American patron Da Ponte founds a school for young gentlemen and opens to them the classics and the world of Italian literature. He becomes a member of a literary club and is induced to fight a duel with a jealous fellow member and would-be critic. He survives the historic cholera epidemic in New York in the 1820s and finally finds his life- ambition in America by bringing opera performances to New York and laying the foundations for the first theater in the country built exclusively for opera.

Lorenzo Da Ponte, poet, scholar, librettist and self-proclaimed champion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, finds himself at the end of the eighteenth century a financial and artistic failure. A conversation with his friend Casanova inspires him to restore both his fortune and reputation in America. After a dispiriting voyage he lands in New York and in a bookshop on Broadway meets and befriends Clement Moore, influential clergyman and future author of Night Before Christmas. Moore introduces his foreign genius to culture-starved New Yorkers to whom Da Ponte recalls his experiences, professional and personal, of Mozart.With Moore as his American patron Da Ponte founds a school for young gentlemen and opens to them the classics and the world of Italian literature. He becomes a member of a literary club and is induced to fight a duel with a jealous fellow member and would-be critic. He survives the historic cholera epidemic in New York in the 1820s and finally finds his life- ambition in America by bringing opera performances to New York and laying the foundations for the first theater in the country built exclusively for opera.