Meeting Mozart: A Novel Drawn From the Secret Diaries of Lorenzo Da Ponte

Meeting Mozart: A Novel Drawn From the Secret Diaries of Lorenzo Da Ponte is a deftly plotted and richly detailed historical novel that spans generations and involves Mozart, mysteries, masquerades, opera, and spies. It brings to light the incredible life story of Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jewish-born priest who created The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte. According to one reviewer, Meeting Mozart is "the musical equivalent of The Da Vinci Code."

The novel opens in the shadows of a war-torn Jewish ghetto in Italy, with the discovery of Lorenzo Da Ponte's secret diaries by his descendent, an opera-loving, Jewish/Italian-American G.I. stationed outside Venice. In the diaries, Da Ponte reveals how he had to live as a Converso in order to survive the anti-Semitism of his era. Over the course of his colorful lifetime, Da Ponte is a gambler, a poet, a womanizer, a murder suspect. He is a friend to Casanova, Mozart's collaborator, an insider at the Hapsburg Court of Vienna, and, eventually, the owner of a deli in New Jersey. An associate of such luminaries as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he also became the first professor of Italian at Columbia University in New York, as well as the first priest to teach there and, more significantly, the first Jew. Throughout his life, he continued to practice his Jewish faith in secret.

In this multi-generational, historical saga, Da Ponte's struggles parallel those of his descendent, Jake Conegliano, and three generations of the Conegliano family in post-war New York. Like his famous relation, Jake must also hide his Jewishness in order to work for the C.I.A. tracking down escaped Nazis, including those who murdered many of his Italian relatives.

Meeting Mozart: A Novel Drawn From the Secret Diaries of Lorenzo Da Ponte is a follow-up to Smith's award-winning novel, Beethoven in Love; Opus 139. Both books are wonderfully imagined stories set in the world of musical giants. The result are splendid literary novels that incorporate both mystery and historical fiction. Smith takes readers from the stylish streets of Europe's most important musical cities to a Jewish deli in early modern New York. And he reintroduces us to captivating historical figures as varied as Mozart, Casanova, and Clement Moore in a complex and often-riveting tale about creativity, identity, and purpose.

Author: Howard Jay Smith
Publisher: Sager Group LLC
Published: 12/10/2020
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.96d
ISBN: 9781950154388


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/0001

About the Author
Smith, Howard Jay: - Howard Jay Smith is an award-winning writer from Santa Barbara, California. Meeting Mozart is his fourth book. He was recently awarded a John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts, Literature Division Scholarship, The James Buckley Excellence in Writing Award. Smith is a former Bread Loaf Scholar and Washington, D.C. Commission for the Arts Fellow, who taught for many years in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and has lectured nationally. His articles and photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, the Beethoven Journal, Horizon, the Journal of the Writers Guild of America, and the Ojai Quarterly. While an executive at ABC Television, Embassy TV, and Academy Home Entertainment, he worked on numerous film, television, radio, and commercial projects. He serves on the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Symphony and is a member of the American Beethoven Society.

This title is not returnable