This chapter is an invitation to look again at eighteenth-century opera – similar, in some ways, to the invitation uttered by Leporello to his master Don Giovanni in the midst of their graveyard escapade. It may be argued in fact that attending to the visual aspect of eighteenth-century opera results in seeing statues nod – a “truly bizarre” scene indeed. In recent years opera scholarship has shown a growing interest in the study of staging and acting of operas from the past, both as a historical enterprise and as an attempt to engage with their performance in the present. Such interest tends to crystallize around later operas, for instance those by Verdi and Wagner, which come with a variety of supplementary materials ranging from contemporary descriptions and reviews, prompt books, pictures, and photographs. Also privileged are those operas that are firmly established in the repertory and therefore are made the object of more or less provocative and authored productions, subsequently disseminated on television and available on DVD.

With the exception of about a dozen operas – including a few by Mozart and a handful by Handel – very little of the exceedingly large and multifarious European operatic production of the eighteenth century is performed in today's opera houses. Even those few to arrive to us do not come with much information about their original staging, sets, lighting, costumes, etc. Staging and acting practices remained throughout the century unswervingly topical and contingent on the economic and socio-cultural conditions of individual theaters.