the Mantuan court, Monteverdi wrote to Striggio on 18 April 1620, offering to help with the staging. A month or so later, however, he learned that the duchess's celebrations had been scaled back, and that there had been no performance of L'Arianna. There is some evidence to suggest a possible performance in Dubrovnik, in or some time after 1620; a Croatian translation of the libretto was published in Ancona in 1633. However, the only known revival of the work came in Venice, in 1640. Public theatre opera had come to the city in March 1637, when the new Teatro San Cassiano opened with a performance of L'Andromeda by Francesco Manelli. The popularity of this and other works led to more theatres converting their facilities for opera; L'Arianna was chosen to inaugurate the Teatro San Moisè as an opera house during the 1639–40 Carnival (the precise date of this performance is not recorded). A revised version of the libretto had been published in 1639, with substantial cuts and revisions from the 1608 version to remove passages too specifically linked to the Mantuan wedding. The composer, who was by then 73 years old, had acquired considerable prestige in Venice, having been director of music at St Mark's Basilica since 1613. The dedication in the revised and republished libretto describes him as "[the] most celebrated Apollo of the century and the highest intelligence of the heavens of humanity". The opera was received with great enthusiasm by a Venetian audience already familiar with the lament, which had been published in the city in 1623. Within a few weeks the theatre replaced L'Arianna with Monteverdi's new opera Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, which proved an even greater success. Loss After the Venice revival of 1639–40 there are no further records of performances of L'Arianna. Rinuccini's libretto, which was published on several occasions during Monteverdi's lifetime, has survived intact, but the opera's music disappeared some time after 1640, with the exception of Ariadne's scene 6 lament, known as "Lamento d'Arianna". In the loss of its music the opera shares the fate of most of Monteverdi's theatrical works, including six of his other nine operas. Carter's explanation for the high rate of attrition is that "memories were short and large-scale musical works often had limited currency beyond their immediate circumstances"; such music was rarely published and quickly discarded. "Lamento d'Arianna" The lament was saved from oblivion by