Opera, created in Florence in the 1580s by a group of artistically inclined noblemen and other city notables, has been in continuous production for more than four centuries in Europe, and three in the Americas. Throughout its history, creators and audiences alike have understood opera as a multi-media art form, one that includes music, text, visual elements, and (often) dance. Because of the great expense of opera performance, local political and economic elites have wielded considerable power over its creators, with the strength of these ties depending on the demands of artistic and institutional conventions. Though the distribution and differentiation of labor in opera performance has varied somewhat according to the historical moment, it has nearly always included – even at its sparest – singers, a stage with a set, instrumentalists, and an audience. And even in the context of quite modest production values, opera has required an enormous variety of material and human resources.

The complexity entailed by opera's combination of multiple artistic media – a complexity which arguably surpasses that of any other art form – means that the study of operatic history demands the analytical tools of a variety of academic disciplines. Nevertheless, until recently, scholars for decades pried opera apart into the discrete fragments most susceptible to their preferred methods of analysis: music, words, singers, theatres, directors, audiences.