duke, who ordered a repeat showing for 1 March. A contemporary account records that the piece "could not have been done better ... The music, observing due propriety, serves the poetry so well that nothing more beautiful is to be heard anywhere". Monteverdi was then required to write several pieces for performance at the wedding of the duke's son and heir Francesco to Margaret of Savoy, planned for early May 1608. These included a musical prologue for Battista Guarini's play L'idropica and a setting of the dramatic ballet Il ballo delle ingrate ("Dance of the Ungrateful Ladies"), with a text by Ottavio Rinuccini. There was also to be an opera, though it was not initially certain that Monteverdi would provide this. Other works under consideration were Peri's Le nozze di Peleo e Tetide ("The marriage of Peleus and Thetis") with a libretto by Francesco Cini, and a new setting of Dafne by Marco da Gagliano. In the event, the former was rejected and the latter designated for performance at the 1607–08 Carnival. The duke decreed that the wedding opera should be based on the myth of Arianna (Ariadne), and that Rinuccini should write the text. Monteverdi was instructed to provide the music. Creation Libretto At the time of his commission for L'Arianna, Rinuccini was probably the most experienced and distinguished of all librettists. His writing career stretched back to 1579, when he had written verses for the Florentine court entertainment Maschere d'Amazzoni. He had become widely known through his verse contributions to the celebrated intermedi for Girolamo Bargagli's play La Pellegrina (The Pilgrim Woman), performed in May 1589 at the wedding of Ferdinando I de' Medici and Christina of Lorraine. According to Gagliano, Rinuccini was a primary influence in the emergence of opera as a genre; he adapted the conventions of his contemporary lyric poets to produce the librettos for two of the earliest operas, Dafne and Euridice—the latter set to music by both Peri and Giulio Caccini. For his Arianna libretto Rinuccini drew on a variety of classical sources, notably the tenth book of Ovid's Heroides, parts of the Carmina of Catullus, and the section in Virgil's epic Aeneid dealing with Dido's abandonment by Aeneas. He also used aspects of more recent literary works—Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Giovanni Andrea dell' Anguillara's 1561 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The libretto was extended during the rehearsals when