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New York, 1825. Italian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte has set up a cake shop and bookstore there with his English wife. After a failed attempt to interest a customer in his autobiography, his wife asks him why he's written so little about the part of his life everyone wants to hear about — his collaboration with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on their three works of opera, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così Fan Tutte. Da Ponte tells the story of his brief but monumental collaboration and friendship with the great genius.
This musical by Satomi Oshima premiered in 2023, with Naoto Kaiho as Da Ponte and Soichi Hirama as Mozart.
This show provides examples of:
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Mozart, of course.
- Historical Domain Character: Everyone who appears in this play was a real person.
- Impossible Genius: Mozart receives some lyrics from Da Ponte, goes to the piano, and instantly writes music for them.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Mozart has a couple of attacks of this during the Magic Flute rehearsal scene.
- Three Chords and the Truth: After losing their patron, Mozart retreats from Da Ponte's more complex, nuanced plots, and writes The Magic Flute. He says it's a story that "anyone can enjoy" because it's simpler, and that it's for the common people, since the age of aristocrats has ended with the start of the French Revolution. Mozart is in no place to tell Da Ponte, who grew up poor, what the common people can or can't enjoy, and Da Ponte tries to convince him that his genius is worthy of more than that.
