This night… we went to the Opera, which are Comedies & other plays represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perpective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions. So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most magnificent & expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent: The historie was Hercules in Lydia, the Seanes chang’d 13 times, The famous Voices Anna Rencia, a Roman, & reputed the best treble of Women; but there was an Eunuch, that in my opinion surpass’d her, and a Genoveze that sung an incomparable Base: This held us by the Eyes and Eares til two in the Morning…
-John Evelyn, Venice, 1645.

With all of the chatter about Comic Con going on right now, it’s a good time to take a moment to reflect on the fact that young men nerding out about new types of spectacles is not a new phenomenon. John Evelyn (1620-1706) would have been 25 at the time that he wrote this entry, having completed his education at Oxford College and basically taking the grand tour of continental Europe to dodge the first English Civil War.
If you’re interested, after the jump I’ve reposted the entry with hyperlinks to information about the things mentioned by Evelyn:

This night… we went to the Opera, which are Comedies & other plays represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perpective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions. So taken together it is doubtlesse one of the most magnificent & expensfull diversions the Wit of Men can invent: The historie was Hercules in Lydia, the Seanes chang’d 13 times, The famous Voices Anna Rencia, a Roman, & reputed the best treble of Women; but there was an Eunuch, that in my opinion surpass’d her, and a Genoveze that sung an incomparable Base: This held us by the Eyes and Eares til two in the Morning…