Holden keeps Mozart in the picture as far as possible — and in the awkwardly ungrammatical title; wouldn’t ‘Mozart’s true phoenix’ have done the trick? He is rather too credulous of suggested links between the two: I do not think there is any real evidence that Da Ponte wrote either the text of Mozart’s oratorio Davidde penitente, or libretto of the abandoned opera Lo sposo deluso? (And though Holden has read widely, he oddly always refers to the Mozart scholar Andrew Steptoe as Patrick.) Another memoir, by the Mozart singer Michael Kelly, provides surely the best judgment of Da Ponte: ‘The Abbé stood mighty well with himself and had the character of a consummate coxcomb’. As Holden traces his later years embroiled in money-losing ventures in London and then moving to America and becoming an Italian professor, and you read of Da Ponte reaching his 90th year, bridging the operatic world from Handel to Wagner, behind the racy story there is always the nagging question: what on earth might Mozart have achieved if only he had lived so long?

Nicholas Kenyon’s latest book is The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, £8.99.

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