In 1805, the year that Wordsworth completed The Prelude and Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar, Lorenzo da Ponte opened a grocery shop in New York. In the first forty years of his life had been poet, priest, lover, libertine, collaborator with Salieri, librettist for three of Mozart's most sublime operas, friend of Casanova, and a favourite of Emperor Joseph II. By the end of his life he would have founded New York's first opera house and become the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. Da Ponte lived through the period when opera came of age - when he was born, Handel was all the rage; if he had survived four more years he could have witnessed Wagner's debut - and he plotted and schemed his way through the opera worlds of both London and Vienna. This was a man who converted from Judaism to Christianity, took the cloth, was banished twice from Venice once for scandalous behaviour, and later for scurrilous versifying, who was an inspired innovator but a hopeless businessman, and who loved with wholehearted loyalty and recklessness.