Until recently, studies of music in Milan typically presented the period of Spanish rule as one of economic decline in which there was little interest in secular music. Most writers credit the Viennese influence under the Emperor for the rise of Milanese music in the eighteenth century, which saw a flourishing – particularly in the quality of the orchestral playing – under Sammartini, and the city drew such major composers as Gluck, Johann Christian Bach and Mozart. Milan has likewise typically been viewed as a peripheral location for opera that relied largely on libretti and scores written in the major centers of Rome, Venice and Naples. More recent studies, however, have begun to revise this view. Roberta Carpani has identified the importance of operas written by Carlo Maria Maggi in the 1660s and 70s, performed first privately at the theater on the Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore under Vitaliano Borromeo and then at the ducal theater in Milan. The work of Davide Daolmi on the early part of the century, and that of Carlo Lanfossi on the extant full scores of seventeenth-century Milanese operas, have drawn attention to a virtually unknown history and repertory. Nevertheless, major developments under Vaudémont, which paved the way for musical life under the new Austrian rule, have largely gone unnoticed: not only his importation of musicians and dancers, the commissioning of a series of new operas and the introduction of new musical elements (detailed in Chapter 3), but also the reconstruction of the opera theater in 1699, the “Regio, Ducal Nuovo Teatro” as it is referred to by the libretti to La prosperità di Elio Seiano and Ariovisto .Because this theatre only existed for nine years – it burned to the ground in 1708 and was replaced by a major new theatre in 1717 – its role has largely been overlooked. Similarly, although the presence of such important figures as Montéclair, Des Noyers and Philbois – who brought with them novel foreign styles and techniques – must have played an influential role in Milanese artistic life, there has until now been little evidence of it.