Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte was Columbia's first professor of Italian literature. Born a Jew in Venice, he was converted to Roman Catholicism and studied for both teaching and the priesthood. Failing at both, he moved to Vienna and Dresden, where he became a noted librettest. Perhaps his crowning achievement in life was writing the lyrics for several Mozart operas.
Following this period, however, he moved on to financial insolvency in London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, where he ran failing grocery and bookselling businesses on the Bowery, and playing the organ at St. Patrick's Cathedral, before running into Columbian Clement Clarke Moore, who offered him a job at the College. De Ponte thus became the first Columbia faculty member who was born Jewish as well as the first to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. His accounts suggest he neither managed to interest Columbia students in Italian nor early New Yorkers in opera.
