This study consists of a new pasticcio opera and a thesis examining the origins of these operas, their development and evolution, from 1600 to the present. It proposes a recontextualisation of the Stildualismus binaries, the supposed change in music from a performance-based culture to a text-based culture, repositioning it as part of society’s transition from orality to literacy. The study argues that pasticcio practices originated in oral storytelling traditions, becoming a feature of most seventeenth-century performance genres. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, a pasticcio approach was used in a range of other art forms besides opera, including sculpture, painting, cinema and television; the principle of pasticcio can even be found in manufacturing processes such as wine. This study challenges the view that pasticcio opera came to an end in the early nineteenth century. Primary research shows that while Her Majesty’s Theatre and Covent Garden increasingly staged continental operas in their original form, nearly every other theatre continued to make use of pasticcio practices throughout the century, regional theatres especially, as a study of Bristol’s Theatre Royal indicates. Nor did pasticcio operas always fall into the bracket of adaptations; eighteenth-century pasticcio operas and oratorios were still programmed in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Pasticcio opera lasted long enough to be broadcast on early television in the 1930s. As well as its performance history, the thesis explores the hostility to pasticcio initiated by nineteenth century reformers and discusses the social and political origins of this antagonism. Copyright increased the commodification of music and, along with reformist attacks, helped diminish the status of pasticcio. The study concludes by illustrating the partial defeat of commodification which has occurred in the internet age, proposing that this has allowed a tentative revival of pasticcio opera in the twenty-first century.