When the soprano singing Floria Tosca, the titular character in Puccini’s opera, flings herself off the set piece to her fictional death at the work’s conclusion, scene shop foreman John Del Bono’s work begins. After making sure the soprano lands on thick foam, he helps her onto a board with wheels and rushes her downstage for her bow. Historically, Del Bono’s performance in this moment would hardly be considered a manifestation of the opera equal to that of the soprano he is pushing. In this presentation, however, I argue attending to the work of Del Bono and his stagehand colleagues at the San Francisco Opera illuminates an alternative mode of operatic performance in which materiality, genre, and invisible labor are intertwined. Drawing on ethnographic work with the San Francisco Opera, my paper examines how stagehands redefine the genre of opera through backstage performances before, during and after the opera itself is sung. I argue these contributions should be understood as stand-alone representations of each opera itself, meaning that the stagehand’s experience might be understood as equivalent to a score or production. While operatic performance has drawn the attention of ethnographers (Atkinson 2006, Steigerwald Ille 2021; 2024, Sikau 2023), such work has focused on the work of singers and directors, not those technicians whose labor offers another lens on contemporary US opera. In putting studies of materiality in dialogue with the embodied experience of operatic labor, I offer new conceptualizations of how different types of musicking are defined, constructed, and valorized.