H. C. Robbins Landon

Three great operas - ""The Marriage of Figaro"", ""Don Giovanni"" and ""Cosi Fan Tutte"" - join the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte's own long life (1749-1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet and librettist who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became Professor of Italian at Columbia University - wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III's London to New York City.

Vivaldi boasted that he could compose a concerto faster that a scribe could copy one. Despite his prolificacy, "The Four Seasons" and the majority of his already published work had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in poverty in 1741. Most of his music - concertos, sonatas, operas, and sacral music - has been published only recently. Very little has been written on Vivaldi for the nonspecialist, especially in English. Landon rediscovers the composer in this accessible and musically informed biography while presenting documentation of the musician's life discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s. This book includes illustrations of 18th century Venice and several newly translated letters, thoroughly evoking the style of the time and revealing some of the more personal aspects of Vivaldi's life.