After a long gap in their reception history, Claudio Monteverdi’s operas have since the early twentieth century become iconic symbols of the early music movement and have entered the canon of so-called great operas.1 This is especially true of Orfeo , a setting of a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, first performed in Mantua in 1607. The conventional explanation for their iconicity is that they are historically important works, the first to realise fully the potential of the operatic genre, and that, like Shakespeare’s plays, they speak to modern audiences and relate to contemporary concerns while also displaying an atemporal sense of ‘greatness’. These explanations, though, are contingent on surrounding socio-cultural factors. Rather than trying to analyse their immanent greatness, it is more revealing to examine how Monteverdi’s operas have been received and performed on stage, going beyond mere chronicle and providing a deeper analysis of the political, cultural, and social contexts of their performative instances. This article demonstrates that by ‘thinking through’ five recent stagings of Orfeo we can come to an enriched understanding both of Monteverdi’s work and of contemporary theatrical concerns.