Rodney Bolt

Rodney Bolt’s book is a colorful, dramatic tale though I had some quibbles with his style and focus. He shows Da Ponte as a gifted, charismatic, tenacious man though one who was prone to be touchy, self-aggrandizing and good at ticking others off.

Da Ponte came from a family of converted Jews and he was named after the bishop who baptized him as was traditional. Bolt establishes Da Ponte’s love of reading and writing early on, as well as his status as an outsider and his difficult show more relationship with his family. He notes that likely Da Ponte’s conversion was one of convenience and though he studied at a seminary and became a priest, he never seemed too concerned about his orders. Da Ponte frequently went from riches to poverty through a variety of circumstances. His intelligence, wit and charisma frequently gained him powerful and wealthy patrons but this often placed him in social or political feuds. Alternatively, he would insult or anger his patrons – he tended to think everyone was out to get him and overreacted to any criticism or coldness. In Venice, Da Ponte fell under the spell of his married lover, Angela Tiepolo, and her useless brother and became addicted to gambling and the hedonistic lifestyle. His brother had to save him from his dissolute life and the extremely jealous and controlling Angela. Before coming to Vienna, Da Ponte switched jobs and towns a couple more times, made plenty of enemies, saw conspiracies everywhere but blundered into a few actual ones, and was driven out of town on account of his inflammatory writing as well another overt affair with a married woman.

Bolt spends the most time describing Da Ponte’s life in Vienna. He was the theater poet and collaborated with several composers in writing his opera libretti. Da Ponte perhaps goes through his usual motions – constantly thinking everyone is out to get him and embarking on another tempestuous affair – but he also had many notable successes. The theater politics described certainly are cutthroat – everyone trying to get their way, the German Singspiel group against the Italian opera group, various composer/librettist or composer/singer pairs in competition, stereotypical diva vs. diva wars. Da Ponte, however, had the favor of the emperor, Joseph II, one only a few people who was uniformly praised in Da Ponte’s memoirs. Some may argue with Bolt’s focus in this section. He spends a lot of time describing Mozart’s life and troubles, often comparing them with Da Ponte’s life. He doesn’t do this with any of the other composers Da Ponte works with (Salieri for one, but also Martin y Soler, who had several highly successful collaborations with Da Ponte and worked with him and fell out with him later in life). There’s not much information about how Mozart and Da Ponte worked on their projects but Bolt has engrossing descriptions of the history surrounding the operas (why Figaro was revolutionary and how they tailored it to Joseph II’s tastes, various workings of Don Giovanni, several sources for Cosi fan tutte). Bolt quotes Da Ponte’s thoughts on the collaborations with Mozart, but is clearly skeptical – saying for example, Da Ponte said Mozart wanted to make Don Giovanni more of a buffa piece, but whatever the truth… The author also takes care to point out that the collaborations were hurried and done mainly for financial reasons. Mozart and Da Ponte’s work in getting the productions together – making cuts or additions in response to star demands to the cast – is also described in depth. I found this very interesting and informative, but others might not appreciate the length spent describing their operas. Da Ponte still has his ups and downs depending on whether his work succeeded or failed. His personal life – feuds with Casti, another Italian librettist, and his patron Count Rosenberg, as well as his relationship with the married singer La Ferrarese – is predictably dramatic. After the emperor dies, Da Ponte falls out with his successor in spectacular fashion and is forced to flee Vienna.

After numerous attempts to get back in the new emperor’s good graces, Da Ponte heads to London but not before getting married. I really couldn’t see how a marriage would work for him, but despite its ambiguous beginning (he was a Catholic priest and they were married in a Jewish ceremony though he had never lived as a Jew during his adult life) the marriage endured. Nancy, his wife, must have been some kind of saint. She went along with him on all his crazy or ambitious endeavors, constantly had to travel when he got kicked out of another place, had many children and also worked – at one point she was the one supporting him. This isn’t even counting the fact that she had to live with him and probably had to listen to his rants and ideas about people conspiring against him. After a number of false starts, the Da Pontes were established in London and Da Ponte starts working for a theater again. While he still has his usual conflicts, the main arguments at the theater seem to be between warring divas. Da Ponte later works as a bookseller but is so deeply in debt that he has to flee to America, following Nancy, who he claims is going to see her family but who knows the truth. In America, Da Ponte has all sorts of jobs, some new to him such as a grocer, others familiar such as teaching and selling books. He attempts several times to bring Italian opera to America at first with some success but not much in later tries.

Bolt creates a wonderful portrait of a highly gifted but self-destructive man. I couldn’t count the number of times Da Ponte was stable and successful, then lost it all yet still somehow managed to resurrect his fortunes. A letter from Mozart called a good librettist “that true phoenix” and the description is very apt. While occasionally the losses were the results of changes in regimes or changing tastes, Da Ponte was responsible for many. He also easily made enemies and used his memoirs to settle grudges. Bolt’s portrayal also shows his restlessness – he didn’t just want to be comfortable and stable, he was very ambitious and eager to share his passion for art, music and literature. Some of his efforts were clearly meant to put himself forward, but he also managed to convey his love of Italian and European culture. My minor criticisms would be that he discussed Mozart but not the other composers. He also seemed to play up Da Ponte’s friendships with famous people such as Casanova and Clement C. Moore (author of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’). My major criticism would be the overuse of quotes. There are way too many quotes, and some of them are whole blocks of text. Coming across a long quote would take me out of the narrative and also made me wonder if Bolt couldn’t be bothered to do his own analysis. Some of the quotes could easily have been summarized or cut down to one sentence and fit into the rest of the Bolt’s writing. It also diluted the impact of quotes that I thought deserved to be shown in full. This was especially rampant whenever Da Ponte moved to a new city and Bolt wanted to describe that city at the time. show less

Surprisingly delightful. I was expecting something scandal-ridden and rackety but in fact we get a story, improbable but very real, of a warm-hearted and intelligent woman, caught in the web of victorian England married to the Archbishop of Canterbury , no less. He's an authoritarian stuffed surplice, marries her as a near-child bride, obsessed for her yet cold. She realises from the start that she has no physical feelings for him, but remains loyal, bearing a brood of children. She has show more little formal education , but holds her own in conversation with the greatest in the land and writes letters of elegance and insight. She goes through a whole series of pchildrenassionate relationships with other strong women. When he dies she instantly loses her entire stats in society, almost like a Hindu widow, but she keeps going and maintains a home for her adult children all of whom are as intelligent and cultured as she is, though ranging between the neurotic and the clinically insane. Amazing story, deeply researched, elegantly written. show less

Fascinating life of Mary Benson, who was called the cleverest woman in Europe. The wife of a Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury, she also had a series of women lovers. Five of her six children survived into adulthood to become prolific writers and they all seem to have been gay or lesbian.

On 23 June 1859, eighteen-year-old Minnie Sidgwick married her distant cousin Edward Benson. The couple had known each other since Minnie was a little girl and Edward had hoped to marry her ever since she was eleven, when he had admired her brightness of spirit and her intelligence. Perhaps marriages of this kind did sometimes prove to be happy. But not this one. Minnie, or Mary as she became as an adult woman, passed from being an anxious, eager-to-please daughter to being an anxious, show more daunted wife. As her husband vaulted up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Mary Benson played the role of dutiful clergyman’s wife, culminating in the greatest challenge of all: the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But who was this woman who stood behind one of the most influential men in the land? And why should we care about her? In this utterly engaging biography, Rodney Bolt brings together family documents, diaries, letters, novels and contemporary material to give us a deep and absorbing picture of an extraordinary woman whose experiences offer a fascinating picture of the Victorian age...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/10/24/the-impossible-life-of-mary-benson-rodney-bo... show less