Editing Claudio Monteverdi (section)

====''L'Arianna''====
{{Main|L'Arianna}}
The music for this opera is lost except for the ''Lamento d'Arianna'', which was published in the sixth book in 1614 as a five-voice madrigal; a separate monodic version was published in 1623.<ref>Whenham (2007) "Catalogue and Index", p. 322</ref> In its operatic context the lament depicts Arianna's various emotional reactions to her abandonment: sorrow, anger, fear, self-pity, desolation and a sense of futility. Throughout, indignation and anger are punctuated by tenderness, until a descending line brings the piece to a quiet conclusion.<ref name= R96/>

The musicologist [[Suzanne Cusick]] writes that Monteverdi "creat[ed] the lament as a recognizable genre of vocal chamber music and as a standard scene in opera&nbsp;... that would become crucial, almost genre-defining, to the full-scale public operas of 17th-century Venice".<ref name=Cusick>{{harvp|Cusick|1994}}</ref> Cusick observes how Monteverdi is able to match in music the "rhetorical and syntactical gestures" in the text of Ottavio Rinuccini.<ref name= Cusick/> The opening repeated words "Lasciatemi morire" (Let me die) are accompanied by a [[dominant seventh chord]] which Ringer describes as "an unforgettable chromatic stab of pain".<ref name=R96 /> Ringer suggests that the lament defines Monteverdi's innovative creativity in a manner similar to that in which the Prelude and the [[Liebestod]] in ''[[Tristan und Isolde]]'' announced [[Richard Wagner|Wagner's]] discovery of new expressive frontiers.<ref name=R96>Ringer (2006), pp. 96–98</ref>

Rinuccini's full libretto, which has survived, was set in modern times by [[Alexander Goehr]] (''[[Arianna (Goehr)|Arianna]]'', 1995), including a version of Monteverdi's ''Lament''.<ref>Sutcliffe (1995), pp. 610–611</ref>