The widespread modern stereotype of the opera as elitist and stodgy stands in stark contrast to what audiences thought of it in mid-17th-century Venice. Back then, it was popular and breathtakingly new. “Taken together, it is one of the most magnificent diversions the wit of man can invent,” wrote the English diarist John Evelyn after seeing his first opera in Venice in 1645.

Opera was born in Venice, and Evelyn’s description was written just as the art form was gaining more popular appeal. Its roots, however, lay not in the great public theaters but in the court. An abbreviation of the Italian expression opera in musica—work in music—opera was conceived around 1600 by a group of Florentine intellectuals, musicians, poets, and humanists who came to be known as the Camerata.