"the gods were always contemporary fantasies, while an abandoned wife and a humbled hero are eternals." The German composer Hans Werner Henze was responsible for the first two-act version, which was produced at the Salzburg Festival on 11 August 1985, with divided critical reaction. Two-act productions have since become increasingly common. The South African artist and animator William Kentridge devised a version of the opera based on the use of puppets and animated film, using around half of the music. This version was shown in Johannesburg in 1998 and then toured the world, appearing at the Lincoln Center in 2004 and at the Edinburgh Festival in 2009. Music According to Denis Arnold, although Monteverdi's late operas retain elements of the earlier Renaissance intermezzo and pastoral forms, they may be fairly considered as the first modern operas. In the 1960s, however, David Johnson found it necessary to warn prospective Il ritorno listeners that if they expected to hear opera akin to Verdi, Puccini or Mozart, they would be disappointed: "You have to submit yourself to a much slower pace, to a much more chaste conception of melody, to a vocal style that is at first or second hearing merely like dry declamation and only on repeated hearings begins to assume an extraordinary eloquence." A few years later, Jeremy Noble in a Gramophone review wrote that Il ritorno was the least known and least performed of Monteverdi's operas, "quite frankly, because its music is not so consistently full of character and imagination as that of Orfeo or Poppea." Arnold called the work an "ugly duckling". Later analysts have been more positive; to Mark Ringer Il ritorno is "the most tender and moving of Monteverdi's operas", while in Ellen Rosand's view the composer's ability to portray real human beings through music finds its fullest realisation here, and in Poppea a few years later. The music of Il ritorno shows the unmistakable influence of the composer's earlier works. Penelope's lament, which opens Act I, is reminiscent both of Orfeo's Redentemi il mio ben and the lament from L'Arianna. The martial-sounding music which accompanies references to battles and the killing of the suitors, derives from Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, while for the song episodes in Il ritorno Monteverdi draws in part on the techniques which he developed in his 1632 vocal work Scherzi musicale. In typical Monteverdi fashion the opera's characters are vividly