Seventeenth-century singers lived and worked in a continuing present, and the historical baggage they carried with them probably extended only to re-used music from a generation or two earlier and memories of more recent legendary local performances. The works that music historians see as significant landmarks such as Euridice, Orfeo and the other early favole in musica would have been just larger-scale realisations of the kinds of theatrical creations that were part of an Italian singer’s normal working life. The reimagining of polyphony as solo song had been part of the singer’s skill set for perhaps a hundred years before composers began to write what we now recognise as monodies. There may perhaps have been a sense of liberation at not having to go through the process of converting polyphony into solo song, but from a technical point of view the vocal delivery cannot have been very different. Singers always had to be aware of the verticality of harmony, or they would have got lost when extemporising. They were also aware of having a special obligation towards the poetic text, and this would have been enhanced by their experience of the more declamatory recitative. There was plenty of instruction available about how to deliver texts or high-speed ornaments, but the detail of how these things were really achieved is not yet visible in the surviving sources. The seventeenth century saw the triumph of the virtuoso and virtuosa, but the art was not just in the velocity of the divisions. This becomes more evident towards the end of the century, when we have the reflections of older singers looking back at the singing of their youth, and we are able to fill in some of the gaps with evidence of devices such as portamento, messa di voce and rubato. None of these (and many other subtle additions to the stylistic repertoire) has an identifiable point of origin: our sources are always conservative and retrospective, leaving us to speculate.