you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

Last night Almost two months ago I saw a college friend of mine singing Vitellia, the lead soprano role, in La Clemenza di Tito. The production was a lovely, small, bare-bones presentation that was unfortunately in a black-box theatre that was both dead and small. So you couldn't get a great tone, and it was really loud (and: of the five major roles, 4 were soprano or mezzo). But the singing was excellent, I had a good time (although my ears were ringing afterwards), and I awoke the next day with a desperate need to figure out who all the characters (who have wonderfully specific names like "Sesto" and "Publio") could plausibly be. Interestingly, there are just enough threads to pull on to construct a pretty compelling subtext out of the prosopography.
( The opera, its angsty political backdrop, and a lot of Tacitus )
Three thousand and some words later -- if anyone is still reading -- what are the conclusions, apart from the fact that ricardienne secretly wants to write fic about this opera? I suppose, that even an extremely superficially "plotted" opera actually has a lot of historical stuff going on behind it, although I would not venture a guess as to the extent to which we should imagine that audiences could or even were intended to recognize it. And, lest you be surprised that obscure characters from Tacitus are operatically viable, a future post will deal with Rimsky-Korsakov's practically unknown historical opera Servilia, which dramatizes the events of Tacitus with the added twist that everyone becomes a Christian before dying at the end.