Lorenzo Da Ponte, poet, scholar, librettist and self-proclaimed champion of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, finds himself at the end of the eighteenth century a financial and artistic failure. A conversation with his friend Casanova inspires him to restore both his fortune and reputation in America. After a dispiriting voyage he lands in New York and in a bookshop on Broadway meets and befriends Clement Moore, influential clergyman and future author of Night Before Christmas. Moore introduces his foreign genius to culture-starved New Yorkers to whom Da Ponte recalls his experiences, professional and personal, of Mozart. With Moore as his American patron Da Ponte founds a school for young gentlemen and opens to them the classics and the world of Italian literature. He becomes a member of a literary club and is induced to fight a duel with a jealous fellow member and would-be critic. He survives the historic cholera epidemic in New York in the 1820s and finally finds his life- ambition in America by bringing opera performances to New York and laying the foundations for the first theater in the country built exclusively for opera.
