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.