MEMOIR
A Small Town’s Dreams
And how I finally got around to finding Lorenzo Da Ponte
The first time I arrived in Cortland NY was on Valentine’s Day. Being new to the US I had no idea what that was or meant. I had come by Greyhound bus for an interview at the college. It was early afternoon and walking up Port Watson Street from the bus stop I held no anticipation of the world vision both the town and the college we going to guide me to.
Coming up I hadn’t thought where I’d spend the night or even whether there was a bus I could catch that day back to New York where my parents and I lived a block away from Fort Tryon Park.
Fortunately the very kind people at Admissions asked and thoughtfully arranged for a guest room in one of the dorms for the night. It was both free and more of a small suite than a room. Sparsely furnished and painted white it had a sitting area and a private bathroom. It felt inviting, peaceful, and unassuming. I was a bit overwhelmed.
Early that evening I went to one of the bars on Main Street (The Mug) and sat on a high chair. The place was quite empty. 10-oz draft beers at happy hour were 15 cents. They went up to a quarter afterwards and the place filled up with students, what at the time seemed to me an awful lot of couples. Quickly the bar worked up to a noisy and cheerful pitch. I took in how unconditionally happy people were.
I walked up the hill on wobbly legs to the room the college graciously provided. I must’ve drunk for over a Dollar’s worth of beers yet through the buzz I had a clear revelation. I was free and independent. I did not have to give an account of myself to anyone. I had never had that feeling before in my life, the awareness of self-determination. I knew where I was going come fall.
Three years later I returned to Cortland following a bout of clinical depression. After a first two years of mixed academic results in a major I did not really care for, I was called by my exasperated father to come home and enroll in an engineering program in Philadelphia. Actually he had somehow already enrolled me! That it did not work out would be a huge understatement. I hated living back home and hated engineering. Depression settled in. There was no real anti depression medication in those days and the pills I was prescribed by a very caring university psychiatrist did nothing. The only moments of relief were my frequent trips back to the old college.
On one of those visits, it was another Sunday afternoon when I had to drive back to Philadelphia, I couldn’t do it. I went to my car but I physically couldn’t open its door and fell on my butt. Sitting on the pavement next to my bag with useless legs I thought what if I just didn’t go back? The clouds of depression lifted just like that, on spring afternoon in a student-housing driveway on Stevenson Street.
From that moment on things went well for me and awful with my family. I had gotten my life back. I changed my major to Physics, told the college I was on my own, and gave an address in town. I became a “townie” and lived there year around. I visited my family occasionally. At the beginning quite sporadically as my father wasn’t speaking to me. I phoned my mother now and then but long distance calls were expensive at the time.
That summer I got a job as a short order cook and had a student known for writing poetry as a coworker. In the kitchen we talked poetry and put out the orders.
Come fall I met the two people who became both mentors and personal friends. An English professor, David who taught Shakespeare and ran a creative writing workshop, and a professor of French, Bob who also taught film. The latter had changed the name of his department to International Communications and Culture so he can introduce a film curriculum. We saw a lot of French films but also Bergman, Bunuel, and European classics.
Being with Bob was like going to France. His office was an open space combined with a classroom and one could always find Bob there sipping hot water and ready to talk about Paris, or Apt, or Cannes, or Deauville. The cast of characters in his accounts were film historians, directors, screen writers, Harry Bell the man who had married 3 different French women, assistant directors, film critics. Bob was an authority on Jean Cocteau and had also amassed an incredible collection of shooting scripts from all over the world. It started when he was a professor in Arizona and developed an interest in Mexican cinema and continued ever since.
But what I loved most about Bob was listening to his daily routine while he was away in France for the summer. Every year he’d leave by bus with his wife right after the graduation ceremony and headed to New York to cross the Atlantic. They had done it first on merchant ships and then flew when they were able to afford it.
Bob would wake up early and made hot water, sipped as he reviewed what he wrote the day before. He’d leave the rented apartment by 8 am. I felt I could see the place, the buildings, the shops opening up, and hear the voices of the French city. Then he’d walk to the library to work for 5 hours straight. Bob loved having a beer and lunch was always centered around “un demi” which was the first thing I ordered when I got to Paris.
In his Cortland kitchen I would sip Dickel Rye with his wife Margie while he cooked Mexican food. Margie would talk me through the books that she had read. It was hard to keep up since she read at least one book a week and saw every movie Bob ever screened for his classes.
The world stretched out from the table in the clapboard house out West to the harsh Arizona sun, to the Mexico City of Los Olvidados, and East to the Paris Cinematheque and the locations of movies by Cocteau, Truffaut, Godard, Melville, Resnais, Carne and so on.
For me they were real places that I absorbed from maps, photographs, and films. There was no Internet or Google Earth. But I could tell you how to walk from one location to the other. Later on when I got to France I went to photograph many of them trying to re-create the film’s original frame.
Summer came and Bob was off to Europe. I housesat for David while he and his family were away in Maine.
My first summer job was as a lab technician for the physics department, then short a order cook, and finally a shaper in a wood factory that made silverware boxes. I had a supervising foreman whose name was only too fitting, Woody.
On days off we “townies” went swimming at the gravel pits in Homer up on Route 11 and got into trouble with the State Police who used to see us skinny-dipping from the interstate overpass. The women swore they saw the troopers using binoculars, but I suppose we were too busy looking at the women to notice the cops until they either yelled at us with a megaphone or actually came down. We swam to the island and waited until they left. One time they took our clothes. We proudly drove naked back to town. It was the 70’s.
Only 20 miles away, was Cornell University in the sophisticated town of Ithaca. Hans Bethe, Carl Sagan and other universe superstars were teaching there at the time. After work I would drive to Cornell for their summer film series. In what seemed a makeshift theater they projected a new film every day in 35 mm with good sound. I saw probably 30 or so films there every summer. Tickets cost 1 dollar.
I don’t remember how David and I became friends. Probably through the creative writing workshop that he encouraged me to attend following a poem I had submitted. There was a good list of poet readings we used to sponsor and I met Robert Creeley, Galway Kinnell, Joel Oppenheimer, Karl Shapiro, among several others.
I often had dinner at David’s house followed by watching a movie with his family on their Sony Trinitron TV — the height of TV technology at the time. David had a few passions that he generously shared with me. One of them was Joseph Conrad novels the other was classical music; mainly Mozart.
Again the kitchen and the TV room reached out from Cortland NY into the world. This time to Tom Stoppard, David Mercer and Harold Pinter, to Stratford upon Avon, London, and the streets of New York.
David kept working at being a writer. He had a couple of novels that lived in a drawer, but his obsessive interest was a book on the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist. Such a magnificent name I thought — Lorenzo Da Ponte, from Venice nonetheless, writing for Mozart — Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte. Somehow the conversation though recurring often, never really went much further than that and I always wondered where David got with it after I left college.
In the spring of my senior year everything changed.
I was applying to a few places for a graduate degree in history of science when David ran into me at the Hollywood Bar and Grill on Groton Av. the night of veal parm special. He asked about what was I planning after graduation. I told him about my applications.
He looked at me and said “You don’t seem very happy about it.” I protested but he wouldn’t buy it. He then asked a question I will never forget. “What do you do when you don’t have anything to do?” I was stunned. I could not answer. “It’s simple, be honest,” he said.
I told him “I watch movies.”
“How many movies can you see in one day?” he asked
“I did see seven one time.”
“Then why don’t you do that? Go and work in film,” and finally ordered food.
Like the day when I sat on my butt in the driveway on Stevenson Street, my life changed in a moment. I felt there was a future I could touch, that felt natural, effortless. The way a passion does not feel like work.
I graduated with a degree in Physics and minors in Math and French. Come September I took the savings I put aside from the job at the box factory, got a duffle bag and a plane ticket. First London then Amsterdam, then Paris. I was away for over six months. Saw a lot of movies, did some poetry readings with my friend John Stigall, hung out at Shakespeare and Co and learned just how sad an American expat’s life could be in Paris.
I came back to New York and enrolled in film school while working in scientific publishing. I lived in Brooklyn a couple of blocks away from Norman Mailer’s place. After that it was back to France for a few years, New York again, then to SE Asia, Romania, and back to the US. I had passed 40 years of age.
While I lived in Paris I was saw Bob often. We had a beer every time, spoke about the book he was writing on Lindberg and Carrel, and accompanied him to the Sainte-Genevieve Library that was around the corner from where I lived.
In South East Asia I helped bring the film adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Victory to be filmed in Indonesia. We shot it close to where the book took place. My Cortland conversations came back alive in my heart and I too fell in love with Conrad’s writing.
In 2009 Bob passed away in his beloved Paris nine months after he lost Margie. David lived for a while with a new girlfriend outside Washington DC and then moved away to South Carolina and we lost touch.
So a few days ago I asked myself, “What about Lorenzo Da Ponte?!”
I looked him up. Wikipedia refers to him as “A Venetian, later American, opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic Priest.”
“What do you mean American?” I caught myself asking out loud? So I dug in.
So briefly and skipping through.
It turns out he was born Jewish with the name of Emanuele Conegliano in the Republic of Venice which was 1052 years in existence at the time of his birth. Less than 5 decades later it would cease to be a sovereign state and maritime republic. When he was 15, Emanuele’s father by then a widower married a catholic woman and the whole family converted. The teenager was baptized Lorenzo Da Ponte. Together with his brothers he studied at the Ceneda seminary. He took Minor Orders in 1770 and was ordained a priest in 1773.
Then all the trouble started. While a priest he took a mistress, with whom he had two children. He met Giacomo Casanova (The Casanova) who became a long time friend. In 1779 Da Ponte was charged with “public concubinage” and “abduction of a respectable woman” and was banned from Venice.
He first moved to the town of Gorizia then part of Austria where he lived as a writer and poet. (This town in 1971 then part of Yugoslavia is where my parents and I looked for a place to cross the border in our effort to escape from Romania.) Eventually in Dresden Da Ponte obtained a letter that introduced him to Antonio Salieri in Vienna. With Salieri’s help Lorenzo Da Ponte became librettist to the Italian Theater in Vienna and met Mozart. He also caught up with his pal Casanova who also had been banned from Venice.
The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II died in 1790 and Da Ponte became unemployed. In Trieste he met a woman Nancy Grahl with whom he moved to London. There he became grocery shopkeeper until in 1803 when he managed to be assigned as librettist to King’s theater.
Financially things did not go well and with creditors on his back in 1805 Da Ponte moved to the US where Nancy had family. New York at the time was a more of a large village than a sophisticated city. It only had one major theater the Park that put on melo-dramas and some recitations from Shakespeare.
In 1811 Lorenzo Da Ponte became an American Citizen. Despite being quite enterprising he was not good with money and soon was saddled with debts and legal troubles. Together with Nancy and the kids they had to move again.
And this is where I had to hold my breath, leaned in, and read twice.
The man who penned libretti for Mozart, Salieri, Vicente Martin y Soler, Francesco Bianchi, Peter Winter and others, a total of 27 operas; who wrote cantatas and oratorios; books of poetry; a four-volume memoir, and a few books among which a history of the Medici and the Florentine Republic went to live in Sunbury PA.
WHERE?! I looked it up on the map. It was a couple of hours drive from where I live.
I decided to go find him and drove out to the town nestled on the banks of the Susquehanna River. I passed through Oley where the entire township is on the National Register of Historic places; Port Clinton which was an important stop on the old Schuylkill Canal; Minersville the anthracite mining town with its magnificent Ukrainian churches; Elysburg home of the largest free admission amusement park that opened in 1926 and is still family owned. Small towns that worked hard for their days of fame and realized dreams.
Lorenzo Da Ponte has a plaque in a little park opposite the corner where he lived and where he once again was a shopkeeper. I stood on the pavement by the Norfolk Southern rail tracks and looked at the building standing on the SW corner of 3rd and Market. There is a three story house that may be the one Da Ponte built when he was the second highest tax payer in Sunbury. The ground floor now has a Spanish grocery store.
I stood there and tried to imagine a life that went from Venice, to Gorizia, Dresden, Vienna, Prague, Trieste, London, New York, and now Sunbury PA selling groceries and distilling liquor.
I asked myself what did he eat rural Pennsylvania? Also, when did he stop being a priest? Or did he?
Once again Da Ponte went broke and ended up spending a night in debtor’s prisons in Sunbury.
But that is not where the story ends. Dreams never quite end. As Bob once said “Passions never die.”
Lorenzo Da Ponte returned to New York. With the help of Clement Clarke Moore was appointed the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. He set to bring Italian Opera to the US. On November 29, 1825 The Barber of Seville was performed in New York with tickets selling at $2 for box seats and Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother and ex King of Spain was in attendance. Don Giovanni was performed at the Park on May 23, 1876. Works by Rossini, Bellini and Mercadante followed.
Together with two partners Da Ponte raised $150,000 to build the first Opera House in New York City at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets. The magnificent theater opened in 1833 with Da Ponte turning 84 in that year.
I had gone to Sunbury on a Monday and almost everything was closed except for a pizza joint. I found it fitting that I sat down to have Italian food. I walked around the empty town, took pictures, and went to see the Susquehanna River thinking Da Ponte may also have stood on it’s banks to watch the moving water.
By the water, I was approached by a man on a bicycle. Wild hair under a baseball hat and wearing a rock & roll tee-shirt, he told me he was running a Facebook page for friends of Sunbury that had over 11,000 subscribers. We talked about the town and he said I should go to the historical society as they may have things on “Lorenzo.”
I told him I doubted they would be open on a Monday. He nodded in agreement but thought it was worth a shot and that he’d meet me there! I went to get my car while he peddled away.
As I pulled into the parking lot in the back of the building my new friend came out of a door marked CLOSED. Yes, they were closed he said, but the volunteer curator was there and we should go in. They opened up the place for me and cheerfully took me to the shelf with documentation on Lorenzo Da Ponte, who according to them left town kind of pissed off.
There were boxes and documents and artifacts all over. The place was getting ready to open for the season on March 1. Looked like a lot of work was going on.
“Thank you for opening up the place for me on the day you’re closed” I said as the curator offered to copy documents for me. “Did you work through the weekend also?”
“We are here all the time.” She said. “There is no time off for passions. This is a dream of ours we all attend to.”
How beautifully fitting!
