Banda (opera)
In opera, a banda refers to a musical ensemble which is used in addition to the main orchestra and plays the music which is actually heard by the characters in the opera. A banda sul palco was prominently used in Rossini's Neapolitan operas. Verdi used the term banda to refer to a banda sul palco, as in the score for Rigoletto. He used the term banda interna, to refer to a band which is still separate from the orchestra but heard from the off-stage wings. The early scores of La traviata use a banda interna.
Origins
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. While Almaviva's serenade is accompanied from the pit in both Paisiello's and Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia, by 1818 Rossini's opera Ricciardo e Zoraide the banda was established as an independent institution in Italian opera houses.Organisation of the ''banda''
Composers such as Rossini and Verdi made use of the banda. Composers wrote music on two staves, and the bandmaster added clarinets in the upper register and brass in the middle and lower. At the Paris Opera in the mid-nineteenth century, Adolphe Sax used only brass instruments, many of them saxhorns.The banda was much like a military band. It comprised about twenty players, but was generally not part of the opera company - usually, the local impresario selected the players. In Palermo, Bourbon troops were recruited for operas, and, in Venice, Kinsky's Austrian army regiment, in a similar capacity, was highly regarded.