Contracts are useful documents for historical research, even if their significance is based more on inference than on fact. They do not say what happened, but they point unequivocally to what was feared might happen. Embedded in them is the memory of past mishaps and misunderstandings. They also illuminate, again obliquely rather than directly, the power relationship between the parties. Whoever sets the most conditions or exacts the heaviest penalties is likely to be the dominant party. Lastly, they can reveal a lot about the financial calculations underpinning the operations to which they refer: how much was spent, when it was spent, and who spent it.

Without doubt, opera has always been, ever since its creation shortly before 1600, the art form that is organisationally most complex, financially most problematic and artistically most diverse. It is the co-operative genre par excellence, depending as it does on the harnessing of several very distinct talents and roles. Any serious dissension between the major participants, and the whole project, affecting dozens of livelihoods, is imperilled. Crucial to the enterprise is the sharing out of risk, so that all the interested parties know that they have to sink or swim together. On the surface, a contract relating to opera may appear at times to place the two parties in an oppositional position, but at a deeper level it furthers solidarity by reinforcing their interdependence.

The present chapter takes the form of a detailed examination of a contract made on 11 December 1714 between the co-proprietors of the Venetian opera house known as the Teatro Sant'Angelo and the freelance impresario Pietro Denzio. It begins with a citation of the entire document in English translation (a transcription of the original is given in Appendix A). This is followed by a point-by-point commentary that makes frequent detours in order to build up a more complete picture of the operatic context as it existed in Venice in the early eighteenth century. The focus here is less on artistic matters than on economic, administrative and social ones.