This is the first collection of essays to explore the wide dimensions and influence of eighteenth-century opera. In a series of fresh articles by leading scholars in the field, new perspectives are offered on the important figures of the day, including Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Rameau and Mozart, and on the fundamental problems of creation, revision, borrowing, influence and intertextuality. Allied arts, notably painting, the novel, ballet, and the spoken stage are also examined in their relationship to the development of opera. The book contains numerous rare illustrations, and will be of interest to scholars and students of opera and theater history.