Was für ein schönes Ende

Josefstädter Strasse 26

1080 Wien

 

In the alleys of Vienna, waiters' boys crooned the words of my songs.

Dear theater audience!
My play "What a Beautiful End" is about a man who was one of Vienna's most brilliant figures and was exiled from that very city. He wrote immortal works that spread throughout the world, but even during his lifetime, his name disappeared from all posters. I'm talking about Lorenzo da Ponte, whose real name was Emanuele Conegliano and who was a Jew from the Venice ghetto. He became a much-acclaimed court poet to Joseph II and who fell from grace overnight. He got into debt and fled to America to escape his creditors. He failed in his attempts to gain a foothold in the New World. He traveled around as a brandy salesman with a liquor cart and was buried in the Italian cemetery in New York, largely unknown. Just a few years after his death, the cemetery was leveled, and since then, the American headquarters of Kraft's Ketchup has stood on his grave.

For decades, his life, between the brightest light and the greatest darkness, between sublimity and ridiculousness, has fascinated me.

In 2000, I wrote a novella about him, two years later a drama, and now I have written a new version of the material for the Theater in der Josefstadt, which focuses on Da Ponte's relationship with his wife, Nancy Krahl.

My motto, that this life is a comic catastrophe, also applies to my dramatic work: I hope that you, dear theater audience, will find something to laugh about in this very serious play.

Yours, Peter Turrini

(Source: josefstadt.org)