This extract is taken from the diaries of John Evelyn, an Englishman who toured Italy in the middle of the seventeenth century. He describes a visit to a Venetian opera in 1645.
(We went) to the Opera, which are Comedies (& other plays) represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perspective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions. So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most magnificent & expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent: The historie was Hercules in Lydia, the Seanes chang’d 13 times, The famous voices Anna Rencia, a Roman, & reputed the best treble of Women; but there was an Eunuch, that in my opinion surpass’d her, and a Genoveze that sung an incomparable Base: This held us by the Eyes and Eares til two in the Morning when we went to Chetto de San: Felice, to see the Noblemen & their Ladies at Basset, a Game at Cards which much use, but play not in publique…..
The opera seen by Evelyn was Giovanni Rovetta’s Ercole in Lidia. The music for this opera has not survived.
Theory of Music 