Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna has been a cornerstone of his fame both in his own time and in ours. In its original form, Monteverdi composed this lament as a dramatic focal point within his opera Arianna. As such, it graced the 1608 wedding festivities of Prince Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua and Duchess Margherita of Savoy. Several ambassadors and other witnesses of this first performance testified to the special power of Monteverdi's music for the Lamento. Monteverdi himself later wrote that this piece was the "most essential part" of the entire opera and a particular challenge to his powers of invention. He published it as a separate entity in 1623 (twice), arranged it once for choral ensemble, and composed a sacred monody (the "Pianto della Vergine" from the 1641 Selva morale e spirituale) on its music. Ariadne's Lament further spawned an entire genre of lament music in the seventeenth century and sparked vibrant theoretical debates regarding the power of music to imitate human emotion. After his death, the Lamento was one of the earliest "revivals" of Monteverdi's music, as early as the 1780s; its first printing was in 1868 Paris. The composer's own arrangement of the Lamento as a five-voiced madrigal has helped fuel the piece's ongoing popularity from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

Monteverdi apparently considered his madrigal arrangement, known by its opening Italian text "Lasciatemi morire," important enough that he placed it at the very beginning of his Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614). Historians have suggested that an unknown Venetian nobleman convinced the composer to re-set his Lamento into the more accessible medium of a bourgeois madrigal. Whether or not that was the case, Monteverdi skillfully translated his most famous solo song into an affective choral idiom. He deleted the original opera's interjected choral commentaries, instead setting just the four parts of Ariadne's own music; he retained the emotionally charged melodic gestures in the upper voice and allowed the lower four voices to share in her plaintive music. Each of the madrigal's four parts thus reflects the shifting affects of the operatic original. In the first strophe, the abandoned lover Ariadne uses frequent chromaticism in her cry to be left alone to die; the second and third sections showcase even more violent despair, in often wild leaps of tritones and melodic sevenths. Ariadne's reluctant conclusion that no one answers her tears in the final section draws the singers into passionately low registers and mournfully "flatward" tonal areas.

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*Watch the original video of Anima's performance on Alexander Nishpal's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKkCAmJW5W8

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