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.