Chapter 1 traces the transmission of pasticcio, as a practice in oral storytelling tradition, into the proto-literate culture of early modern society. While mass literacy in the nineteenth century brought an end to pasticcio in many narrative artforms, it survived in opera. This chapter explores why. Early opera’s many oral inheritances include the predominance of words over music, mimesis in learning roles and an oral rather than literate relationship with visualisation. Credible motivations are weak in early opera, as they are in storytelling. Rhetoric provided much of the framework for operatic structures and the chapter argues that this classical oral inheritance, although mediated through text, provided another means whereby oral narrative approaches shaped opera in the teeth of an increasingly literate culture. This approach restored a profound type of immersion in a story, one which had largely disappeared from spoken theatre. This kind of immersion was much written about and was a key factor in the popularity of opera. Pasticcio was much used in its creation, but intertextualities intended to be ‘read’ by the audience are argued to belong to more literate periods. References and allusions abound but a pasticcio created a new original.