To dis-enchant the world is to leave it un-sung. Modernity registers its songlessness by trying to re-enchant the world with its own voice. The revelation of this unsung condition occurred in the final decades of the sixteenth century, which witnessed an obsession with song as an Edenic mode of expression. The vocal turn in music, from which opera is born, is a symptom of disenchantment. Opera sings in an unsung world as nostalgia for an ancient age enchanted by music. Perhaps this is why the earliest operas were all pastorals, set in Arcadian landscapes emptied of dung and toil, and filled with singing nymphs and demigods mingling among the shepherds and lovers. The pastoral is the world as a garden, a secular Eden conjured by the desires of the urban imagination, where work is play because the only implement that works nature is the very lyre that enchants it. This Orphic lyre, (mis)represented by the Renaissance as a lira da braccio, colonises the landscape with its harmonies, modulating the brutality of nature into the grace of culture. And the figure who dramatises the Arcadian landscape is Orpheus, the son of Apollo, the god of music. He is the one who undulates the landscape with the drones of the lira da braccio; his song is the eco-system of the enchanted world. Music is the magic that makes the pastoral.