 
                         20060325.01

                     Cosi fan tutte (9)

     I have just finished reading a biography of Lorenzo
DaPonte by Sheila Hodges, ISBN 0-246-120001-0, published in
England in 1985. Stylistically, the book leaves much to be
desired.  It is is a concatenation of anecdotes, of private
and public documents, and extracts of DaPonte's own memoirs.
painting a picture of DaPonte's long and eventful life, on
some pages in broad stokes, but usually in disconnected,
disconcerting detail.  What seems to me lacking on the part of
the biographer is understanding of the inordinate sensitivity,
affectionateness and generosity of her subject, endearing
qualities which shine through the often dreary and dispirited
fabric of a life of poverty in exile.  It seems so obvious to
me (as distinct from Sheila Hodges) that it was these
endearing qualities which led to the scandals that caused
DaPonte first to be banished from Venice, then to be banished
from Vienna, then, in England, drove him so deeply into
debt, that to escape prison he had to flee to Philadelphia,
and finally made his life in American society, where he remained
to the day of his death a foreigner in spirit, awkward and
difficult almost to the point of impossibility.  The story of
a man forever in search of home.  When his life was ship-
wrecked on America's shores he became a missionary of Italian
culture, literature and music, especially opera, to his
semiliterate neighbors.  The epitome of the wandering Jew,
whose name change and whose family conversion to Catholicism,
was forced by the second marriage of his father to a
Christian woman, but whose true religion was never anything
other than Italian Literature, a Protestant in spirit, who
found his salvation in the Holy Writ, albeit Italian, whose
Bible was Dante and Ariosto, a Jew, who unlike Joseph,
succumbed to the seductions of a series of Potiphar's wives,
difficult and hostile women who gave him no end of trouble,
until he met Nancy Grahl, whom, although nominally a Catholic
priest, he married, and in whose arms he found some measure
of peace.  In elaborating on the saga of Don Giovanni,
DaPonte wrote not his own biography, but that of his
opposite: a libertine who scorned his women; DaPonte's deep
love for them is documented, if nowhere else, in his
account of Fiordiligi.  He was _not_ Don Giovanni.  He did
_not_ abandon his paramours: they abandoned him.  He never
abandoned Nancy.  But maybe I empathize too much; maybe I'm
too much of a novelist to be a good biographer or historian.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
