Commenting on the emerging ‘material turn’ in opera studies, Jonathan Sterne recently cautioned about the need to define what we mean by a term as ‘seductive yet baggy’ as materiality. Yet even if we sidestep the confusion of the competing Marxist, media theoretical, neuroscientific, ontological and ecological materialities that Sterne invokes, to start instead with a more naīve quest for opera’s historical material traces – its objects and its things – where might the limits of such a search lie? And must the realm of the material for the opera scholar necessarily function, as Sterne suggests, as a way ‘to get at the immaterial, the ephemeral, the mortal’? What, in short, might a material history of opera look like?