The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (50 page)

In June 1779 Da Ponte was charged under the prohibition forbidding
mala vita
(basically, a debauched life), with specific reference to the section
dealing with
rapito di donna honesta
(abducting a respectable woman). Once again he displayed a curious indifference to his trial, not even bothering to turn up as the court proceedings ground on through the long, hot months of summer. However, he must have belatedly realised the seriousness of his position, since before he could be found guilty he slipped out of Venice. In his absence the Council of Ten sentenced Da Ponte to fifteen years in exile, and if he was discovered anywhere in the Republic during this period he would be ‘imprisoned in a dungeon without light for seven years’.

Da Ponte eventually made his way to Dresden, where his friend Mazzola was achieving great success as a librettist. Here Mazzola took him on as his assistant, and Da Ponte quickly found that his talents were superbly suited to the writing of operas. However, his other talents also remained very much to the fore, culminating in a typical episode concerning a painter whom he had befriended. Having seduced the painter’s two daughters, who both wanted to marry him, he confessed to their mother that he was unable to choose between them, ‘and if it were not against the law, I would have asked both of them to marry me’. Having explained his dilemma, he then made an attempt to seduce the mother. Enter the outraged husband … Da Ponte descided it was time he left Dresden, and departed for Vienna. As a farewell gift his loyal friend Mazzola gave him a letter of introduction to the leading court composer, Antonio Salieri, who happened to have been born in Venice, but had left at the age of nineteen.

Da Ponte arrived in Vienna in late 1781, where he was overjoyed to be introduced to his hero Metastasio and to meet up again with his old friend Casanova. Salieri employed Da Ponte as a librettist, and after an initial setback they soon achieved such success that he came to the attention of Mozart. Who was better equipped to write the libretti for
Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro
and
Così fan tutti
(loosely, ‘everyone does it’ – a justification that Da Ponte himself may well have used on occasion). Like his Venetian compatriots Vivaldi and Goldoni, Da Ponte would achieve prolific creativity at his peak. In his memoirs he claimed that whilst writing
Don Giovanni
he was also simultaneously writing two full-length operas for other composers. In his own words, ‘I went on working for twelve hours every day, with brief intervals, for two months without a pause. A bottle of
Tokay on my right, my inkwell in the middle and a box of Seville snuff on my left.’ When he required anything else, he would ring a bell for his landlady’s daughter: ‘A beautiful young girl of sixteen (whom I would have liked to love simply as a daughter, but …).’
*

For ten years he would remain in Vienna. At one point he was congratulated by the emperor Joseph II on his work; at another he survived poison, which had been given to him by a jealous lover. In 1790 he was finally banished from Vienna, perhaps for privately circulating a satire on the new emperor, Leopold II, or possibly as a result of court intrigue. Da Ponte would blame Salieri, whom he claimed had now become his enemy.

There followed years of wandering and various adventures. Yet the days of amorous dalliance came to an end two years later, when the forty-three-year-old Da Ponte travelled to Trieste, where he fell in love with and married a young Englishwoman called Nancy Grahl (whose Jewish parents had also converted to Christianity). An unlikely but enthusiastic convert to married life, Da Ponte continued to work as a librettist with diminishing success, staying in Paris, Holland and then London, where he and his family were soon penniless. Da Ponte wrote despairingly to his friend Casanova, who helpfully suggested that Da Ponte should recoup his fortunes by selling Nancy’s favours. Da Ponte drew the line at this, and eventually, on the point of being arrested for debt, took ship for America – having prudently despatched Nancy ahead of him with their four children. Here he would live out his last years, variously becoming a grocer in Philadelphia, writing his memoirs and becoming a professor of Italian in New York, before losing his savings investing in an Italian opera house. Even so, he would live to see
Don Giovanni
performed in New York for the first time, before dying there in 1838 at the age of eighty-nine. Like his friend and collaborator Mozart, who had died forty-seven years previously, Da Ponte was buried in an unmarked grave.

By now the Europe that Da Ponte had known was utterly changed. The forces of liberty, which he had previously championed, had once more triumphed. Six years after America had gained independence from Britain, the people of France rose up and overthrew the rule of Louis XVI, who
would be sent to the guillotine. No king or ruler in Europe now felt safe from his downtrodden subjects. In an effort to overcome the revolution, attacks were launched on France from all sides, and elsewhere repression became the order of the day. Once again Europe was in turmoil. Though Venice would remain geographically and politically on the margins of all this, the tourist trade dried up – this time causing considerable economic hardship and unrest. The Council of Ten tightened its grip even further, and its spies were everywhere. Meanwhile the revolution in France prevailed, and as its armies defended its territory a charismatic young military genius called Napoleon Bonaparte rose through the ranks.

*
It is interesting to note that Cardano may well have been rector of the University of Padua at the time.

*
In years to come, the condemned man would be hanged with his back to the water, thus ensuring that the last thing he saw was the Torre dell’Orologio (the Clock Tower, across the Piazzetta) marking the time of his death. This custom gave rise to the seemingly innocuous, but in fact chilling Venetian threat:
‘Tefasso vedar mi che ora che zel’
(I’ll show you what time it is).

*
Literally, the Palace of St Moses. The Venetians adhered to the Byzantine tradition of canonising the leading figures and prophets of the Old Testament.

*
In terms of contemporary monetary proportion (and possibly value), the amounts involved were at least on a par with the amounts gambled in the 2007—8 financial crisis. Finance ministers, and even individual financiers, have frequently gambled on a national scale: Law was gambling on an international, imperial scale.

*
Several different types of gold pistole were in circulation during this period, minted anywhere from Spain to Hungary, most of which had different values. It is safe to assume that the value of the coins at Law’s elbow was probably around 10,000 ducats. Indeed, the English sources who recorded this scene may even have mistaken the ducats for pistoles in the first place.

*
There is evidence that he may have made at least one brief trip to his native city during the previous nine years.

*
Anzoletta is the Venetian version of her first name. This is frequently written as Angioletta, but I have retained the dialect spelling to distinguish her from Angiok Tiepolo.

*
The ellipsis is Da Ponte’s.

20

The Very End

D
URING THE LONG
years of Venice’s decline artists of the calibre of Vivaldi, Goldoni and Tiepolo had left to seek their fortune in exile. Now the city was reduced to exporting the likes of Da Ponte and his notorious friend Casanova.

Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt had been born in April 1725 – he was not originally of noble birth, his ‘de Seingalt’ title being his own creation. His mother, Zanetta, was an actress (who, as we have seen, would later tour in the same troupe as Goldoni); at the age of sixteen she had eloped with an actor-dancer named Gaetano Casanova. The following year she would produce her first son, Giacomo, whose real father was almost certainly Michele Grimani, a man of noble family who owned the San Samuele theatre where Gaetano and Zanetta had been performing. Zanetta soon went on tour abroad and achieved considerable success in Dresden, then in London, where in 1727 she had a second son, this time by the Prince of Wales, who ascended to the throne that same year as George II. Meanwhile young Giacomo was brought up by his maternal grandmother. According to Casanova’s memoirs,
*
at this period in his life, ‘I was very weak, ate practically nothing, was unable to concentrate on anything, and looked like an idiot … I had difficulty breathing and always kept my mouth open.’ In an effort to cure him of his ailments, which included a ‘constant nosebleed’, his grandmother took him on a gondola to the island
of Murano, where they visited the ‘hovel’ of a local witch: ‘She was an old woman sitting on a straw-filled mattress who had a black cat in her arms and five or six more around her.’

At the age of nine he would be boarded out in Padua with a priest, the Abbé Gozzi. From the outset, Casanova displayed astonishing abilities: according to his own testimony, he learned to read and write within a month. He began reading theology books in the abbé’s library, but one day came across a ‘forbidden’ book, which he appears to have enjoyed, despite his young age. At eleven he fell in love with the abbé’s fourteen-year-old sister Bettina, who ‘little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which was later to become my ruling passion’. The abbé had designated Bettina to look after Casanova, and in the morning she would come to wash him before he got up, ‘telling me that she did not have time to wait for me to get dressed’. She would:

wash my face and neck and chest, and then give my body further caresses which I knew must have been innocent even though they excited me … One day, sitting beside me on the bed, she told me that my body was beginning to grow and demonstrated this to me with her own hands, arousing a feeling in me which would not stop until it exceeded all limit and surpassed itself.

And with this Casanova was launched upon his ‘ruling passion’. A year later he enrolled at the University of Padua, where he studied philosophy, law, mathematics and chemistry – the last-named awakening in him an interest in alchemy and the occult sciences. He read widely, including works on the Kabbala and magic, as well as taking a keen interest in medicine (which he later regretted having not taken as his main subject). All this was accompanied by a steady diet of erotic literature. Like any other student he caroused in the taverns, but surprisingly did not accompany his fellow students to the bordello. Instead he appears to have become something of a chaste, precocious dandy who developed ‘a longing for literary fame’. However, he did develop a taste for gambling, which would become a lifelong preoccupation. But despite his fine mathematical talent, he frequently miscalculated the odds, incurring heavy losses. After he completed
his studies in 1739, his grandmother paid off his debts and summoned him back to Venice. Here she insisted that he take minor orders in preparation for becoming a lawyer (a common practice at the time).

Possibly through the influence of his real father (who remained a shadowy influence) Casanova now acquired as a patron the seventy-six-year-old senator Alvise Malpiero, who in his time had achieved a somewhat dubious name for himself by acquiring (and being able to afford) twenty mistresses, whilst simultaneously gaining a reputation for being a homosexual. It was at Malpiero’s palazzo on the Grand Canal that Casanova learned the manners required in upper-class society – a schooling in the flourishes of charm and ingratiation for which he had a natural talent.

And it was now, at the age of sixteen, that Casanova had his first bonafide sexual experience. According to his memoirs, this was achieved in suitably impressive circumstances, when he succeeded in seducing (or was seduced by, it is difficult to distinguish) two sisters of aristocratic family, the sixteen-year-old Nanetta and the fifteen-year-old Marta. All three would appear to have been virgins when they got into bed together, but found their mutual deflowering so exhilarating that they ‘spent the rest of the night in ever varied skirmishes’. Casanova’s memoirs, written in his later years, contain many exaggerations and even palpable falsehoods; on the other hand, many of his most implausible and unlikely escapades almost certainly took place, having about them an idiosyncratic and psychological ring of truth. Casanova may have been a fabulist, but he also lived a fabulous life. And the story of his first full sexual experience with the two sisters (members of the noble Savorgnan family, which Casanova tactfully omits to mention) appears utterly credible, especially given the moral example set by their elders in the Venice of the period.

Having launched the career of his ‘ruling passion’ there was now no holding back on Casanova’s behalf. In quick succession he was angrily dismissed from the Malpieri palazzo after being discovered in a compromising embrace with a young girl who was intended for his host’s delectation; and he was also dismissed from his seminary for being found in bed with a young boy. On the latter occasion Casanova seems to have been innocent – though in the years to come he would not be so prudish as to deny himself the occasional homosexual adventure. As his memoirs make clear,
Casanova was to be omnivorous in his sexual exploits: women, men, sisters (separately and together), mothers and daughters (ditto), women disguised as castrati, undisguised castrati,
ménages à trois, ménages à quatre
, and so on – all were welcome.