Who corrected a libretto for the mozarts opera ” Don Giovanni”?
Well Casanova is probably the answer you are looking for but the evidence that he ‘corrected’ the libretto is pretty circumstantial and there is no reason to believe anything he might have written was actually used in the opera at all. What The Librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, certainly did do was use his friend, rival and sometimes enemy Casanova as source material in his rewrite of a libretto by Giovanni Bertati written for an opera by another composer. The relationship between Don Giovanni and Leporello is based on da Ponte’s experience with Casanova and his servant named Costa. It should be remembered that Casanova was a compulsive lier both in his memoirs and his letters so any evidence from him is unreliable. da Ponte never mentions anything about any Casonova help in his memoirs, although he has quite a lot to say about Casanova himself. My guess is that this idea came from a Casonova biographer building a case out of flimsy evidence.
