He chased women with Casanova, was thrown out of 1770s Venice for gambling and “seditious verses,” and then exiled from Vienna when his operas fell from favor; starting over in the New World, he introduced Italian opera to New York audiences and the Italian department to Columbia University. So it was with great delight that Pennsylvanians learned from The New York Times this week that the great Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s famed librettist of classics like “Don Giovanni,” spent time as a small-town grocer in Sunbury, where – like so many New Yorkers seeking affordability – he had settled during a nadir in his colorful life of perpetual reinvention. Despite his considerable losses gambling and elsewhere, Da Ponte’s legacy some 200 years later – and, as the Times chronicles, his progeny’s devotion to it – is undeniably a win for the ages.
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