While the capacity of music to move the emotions has received a good deal of
attention from musicologists, philosophers, and psychologists, the history of set design
has not considered how these sets created immersive environments that induced an
affective response. Instead, the attitudes expressed by Addison continue to cast a long
shadow over research into music and the performing arts. Twentieth-century scholarship
has often been dismissive of set design, regarding it as formulaic, unimportant, and a
distraction from the serious poetry and sublime music. This dismissal of scenography
has come about because set design has typically been studied only on the margins of
musicology, art and architectural history, and theater studies. This is, in part, because
there are virtually no opera sets that survive from the baroque period, requiring
them to be reconstructed from drawings made as part of the design process and from
engravings made after to commemorate the sets. These are typically monochrome and
two dimensional, whereas in reality sets were vividly colored and three dimensional. In
addition, much of the serious scholarship that has been done has concentrated on the
progression of visual technologies.9 Studying the emotional effect of stage sets prompts us
to look more closely at their reception, rather than at their construction. To understand
how audiences reacted to the visual aspect of a performance is important not only
because it fills in another missing piece in our attempts to reconstruct what a theatrical
performance was like in the baroque period, but also because the visual spectacle itself
generated so much controversy. There were endless debates, along similar lines to those
discussed above, about whether operas should have sets, and whether performances were
too focused upon the magnificence of the setting and the ingenuity of the machines at
the expense of the poetry and narrative