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MOT's spring opera season offers both
well-loved and rarely performed works.
BILL CARROLL
Special to the Jewish News
ichigan Opera Theatre
will launch its spring
season at the Detroit
Opera House Saturday,
April 20, with a Verdi masterpiece and
conclude in June with a Mozart favorite
as it seeks to shake the post-Sept. 11
doldrums that affected many theater
companies throughout the country.
Ticket sales and charitable donations
fell measurably everywhere — then
snapped back. MOT's season subscrip-
tions, for example, have dropped about
15 percent — with some opera goers
reluctant to commit to long-range plans.
On the other hand, individual event
sales have picked up.
MOT founder and General Director
David DiChiera won't let the current
conditions get him down as things slow-
ly return to normal.
"In order for MOT to continue to
mature and thrive in our fourth decade,
we must move forward aggressively,
expand our repertoire, create our own
artistic vision of the world's
great operas and increase
our marketing efforts," he
asserted.
"Our spring season
offers something new in
this respect for audiences:
newly designed productions, works new
to our repertory and, of course, the
finest artists to bring these works to life."
Baritone Mark Delavan is the
scheming Iago, and soprano
Giuseppina Piunti makes her North
American debut as
Desdemona
A scene from
From `Otello' to 'Figaro
The spring season con-
"The Marriage
Giussepe Verdi's Otello, open-
tinues May 11-19 with
of Figaro," which
ing tomorrow and running
Leo Delibes' exotic opera
will be staged by
through April 28, features
Lakme, from which the
returning Jewish-
Russian tenor Vladimir
enchanting "Flower
Canadian director Duet" and "Bell Song"
Galouzine, who will sing the
Bernard Uzan.
title role for the first time in
originate. Internationally
North America.
famed soprano Sumi Jo
Otello tells the tragic tale of
returns to MOT for her
the governor of Cypress,
debut as the beautiful
whose ruthless ensign, Iago, fans the
Brahmin priestess Lakme.
flames of suspicion that Otello's cap-
Lakme, which premiered in 1883,
tain and Otello's wife, Desdemona,
was once very popular on the interna-
are lovers. Adapted from
tional stage because its exotic setting
Shakespeare's Othello, the title charac- in India particularly appealed to
ter's passion for justice leads to his
Europe's fascination with the East.
and Desdemona's destruction.
The opera
•
Tigaro's' Other Half
The checkered career of Mozarts favorite librettist.
Consignments Considered
DIANA LIEBERMAN
Copy Editor/Education Writer
Vintage with a Vision
3305 Orchard Lake Rd. • Keego Harbor
(Next to House of Denmark)
Phone: 248-683-2455
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114
4/19
2002
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T
he librettist for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most
revolutionary operas — The Marriage of Figaro,
Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutti — was a Jewish-
born poet, violinist, translator, bookshop owner, gambler,
libertine and priest, whose final job was as professor of
Italian at Columbia University in New York.
Lorenzo da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on
March 10, 1749, in a small town north of Venice, where
his father was a leather merchant. After his mother died,
his father married a Catholic woman and the whole family
was baptized by a local bishop, Monsignor Lorenzo da
Ponte, whose name the 14-year-old Emanuele adopted.
As a young man, da Ponte's skill at languages, including
Hebrew, enabled him to become a professor of classics and
vice rector of a seminary. He was ordained as a priest in
1773, but his behavior was distinctly unclerical, including
numerous relationships with married and unmarried
women alike. Da Ponte met Mozart, in Vienna, after he
had been exiled from his native country.
The Marriage of Figaro, which debuted in 1786, was the
pair's first collaboration The
choice of text was a controversial
one. The original play, by French
playwright Pierre Augustin
Caron de Beaumarchais, lam-
pooned the politics of the time
and showed servants as more
capable than their masters. The
Lorenzo da Ponte
play was viewed as an attack on
the aristocracy and can be seen as
a foreshadowing of the French
Revolution, which began in 1789.
'In the years following Mozart's death, da Ponte, who had
been poet of the court theater of the Hapsburg emperor,
lost his job and moved to London. In addition to his writ-
ing and translating, he ran a used bookshop. He immigrat-
ed to the United States with his common-law wife, also
Jewish-born, just as he was about to be arrested for debt.
They were listed in the ship's log as Mr. And Mrs. Da
Ponte, Anglicans.
As usual, da Ponte landed on his feet. After running a dis-
tillery, grocery store, cartage service, bookstore and rooming
house, he was appointed to the faculty of Columbia