[2] Diegetic depictions of music making are present in the earliest operatic depictions of Orpheus accompanying himself but larger onstage ensembles seem to have first appeared in Don Giovanni, most spectacularly in the polymetric Act I ball where the wind Harmonie is joined by two violin-and-bass bands to simultaneously accompany minuet, contradance and waltz.
Giovanni Paisiello's opera Pirro, which opened weeks later in December 1787, marks the first use of the term banda in the sense of a wind band.
Composers wrote music on two staves, and the bandmaster added clarinets in the upper register and brass in the middle and lower.
In Palermo, Bourbon troops were recruited for operas, and, in Venice, Kinsky's Austrian army regiment, in a similar capacity, was highly regarded.
The so-called Kinsky band at Venice had a very high reputation, and Verdi, who had refused to write for it in Attila, took good care to include it in all his subsequent Venetian operas".