Hurray for virtue; hurray for manuscripts

1. I went to an opera. It was quite good, but beforehand they made us watch a film some poor school kids had been forced to make about what it all meant to them, which was painful. The opera was Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, which I've long wanted to hear because it features heavily in Julian Rathbone's Intimacy, in which a dying castrato teaches a woman to sing the role of Nero. It turns out to be quite remarkably decadent and amoral, with the triumphant lovers both nasty pieces of work. Both Poppea and Ottavia have bawdy nurses: Poppea's nurse disapproves of her affair with Nero but only because she doesn't think it will lead anywhere, and she says she prefers more fruitful sinning; Ottavia's nurse say that she should get revenge on her husband's infidelities by taking a lover, which would be OK because Nero is hurting her living feelings, while she'd only be hurting his reputation. The work starts with an argument between the goddesses of Fortune, Virtue and Love, and Love, backed up by Fortune, is the winner because the opera ends with Poppea enthroned as empress. But given that the one thing I knew about Poppea before this is that Nero later kicked her to death when she was pregnant (though I think actually in some sources he kills her by another means), and given that anything I know about Roman history was probably much more commonly known in seventeenth-century posh Italy, doesn't that rather undercut the whole thing? The duets are beautiful; but it's still all an illusion, and if Poppea had stuck with her intial lover Otto she could still have been empress later. In the libretto soldiers are complaining about the way the empire is falling apart while Nero has love affairs; and just before Nero makes him kill himself for criticising his affair with Poppea, Seneca tells Nero that his having faults would be forgiveable if they weren't so banal. Isn't this subtly giving Virtue a boost? The school film had the kids talking about the three goddesses; maybe I'm terribly uptight but I really don't like listening to children talking about love. No one defended Virtue; I think I would have when I was fourteen, but probably only out of contrariness, to be honest.

2. I went to Trinity and looked at a beautiful manuscript. It's been quite some time since I looked at my sort of stuff and it was very heartening. Sometimes just having a book like that open in front of you at a good point can be a very refreshing thing. Also it was nice to catch up with the Trinity people. I used to work there long enough ago now that returning is a nostalgia trip. But I had a thought: maybe it's actually a good thing I don't have time to write my book on eleventh-century script right now. It's a kind of brinkmanship: if I live to be about sixty and produce it then, it might be quite a good book, assuming I get to continue to look at manuscripts in the interim.