And his passion for opera left him needing to stage an event and put opera, Italian opera, back in the fold.” It’s hard to fathom today, but that’s where he was found until rescued, and he ended up being the first professor of Italian language at Columbia College, now Columbia University. He headed to America, and this great Italian man ended up on the Lower East Side as a poor grocer. “In London, he was in debtor’s prison time and time again and finally fled London for the New World. He lived in a brothel, and he incurred massive gambling debts … So he was forced, at one point, to leave Venice,” Mann recounted. “He was, for lack of a better term, a real scoundrel. ’ He is a character who… if we were playing one of those games, ‘Who can I have dinner with and go back in time,’ I now fully appreciate he’d be at that table.” “Lorenzo Da Ponte, of course, known as Mozart’s great librettist, wrote everything from ‘ Marriage of Figaro to Don Giovanni. We started with the protagonist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, as a side note, but very quickly realized he was the musical note that held the film together,” said Mann.
“It’s an amazing assemblage of figures, a cast of characters that somewhat defies reason in all those involved. The wildlife of Lorenzo Da Ponte, who first staged the Oratorio: ATL PBA is airing “ The Oratorio” Friday, Nov. Mann joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about his new documentary, “ The Oratorio: A Documentary with Martin Scorsese ,” and the remarkable history it traces of a choral musical achievement nearly lost to time. The revival of the lost “Oratorio” performed originally within its walls some two hundred years ago resulted from an improbable confluence of epic events. The Cathedral was a fixture in the lives of Scorsese’s family going back generations. The filmmaker lent his assistance to the director, writer, and producer Jonathan Mann in chronicling efforts to recreate a mostly-forgotten operatic performance at New York’s Saint Patricks’ Cathedral in 1826, “the Oratorio“. A once-in-a-lifetime, twice-in-two-centuries spectacle is the subject of a new documentary created with the help of famed director Martin Scorsese.
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