FitzLyon, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Condition : good condition, slight signs of shelf wear, previous owner inscription.
Illustrations : frontispiece and 8 black and white plates out of text.

Complete edition with preface.

April FitzLyon was a scholar, biographer, outstanding translator and intellectual of great culture, who included a deep interest in Russia, its literature, history and welfare, and a passion for music.
She wrote the first biography of Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (The Libertine Librettist, 1955, reprinted three times), who had been a revolutionary in Venice, then succeeded Metastasio as court poet in Vienna under the benevolent reign of Josef II, produced three opera texts for Mozart, became an opera director in London, then the first professor of Italian at Columbia University in New York, where performances of Don Giovanni were given without any mention of the composer. Da Ponte's boastful and unreliable memoirs have been carefully debunked by April FitzLyon's meticulous scholarship.