ABSTRACT
During the early years of public opera production in the theaters of Venice in the mid-seventeenth century, spectacular stage effects were of central importance to the development of the genre. Composers, librettists, and performers who made up the companies that staged operas worked in a theatrical culture that prized highly elaborate visual productions. Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria was the first of three operas that Claudio Monteverdi wrote for the Venetian stage, produced at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo during the 1639–40 Carnival season. The study of stage productions situates both performers and scholars in a practical mode of engagement with the sources of music history. In a genre in which so much of the performance is an ephemeral event in a theater, there is often comparatively little information about stage movement and design, compared with the sources that record the text and music.
