Probably of all the employers of dissonance for the purpose of emotional expression, in the whole course of the seventeenth century, when the aims of musicians were so tentative that it required courage to brave convention, the most daring was Claudio Monteverde. “As Monteverde most frankly of all musicians of his time,” writes Sir Hubert Parry,[20] “regarded music as an art of expression, and discords as the most poignant means of representing human feeling, he very soon began to rouse the ire of those who were not prepared to sacrifice the teaching of centuries and their own feeling of what really was artistic without protest. That he should presume to write such simple things as ninths and sevenths without duly sounding them first as concordant notes[21] was so completely at variance with the whole intention of their art that it struck them with consternation. And well it might, for small as these first steps were they presaged the inevitable end of the placid devotional music. The suddenness of the poignancy which unprepared discords conveyed to the mind implied a quality of passionate feeling which musicians had never hitherto regarded as within the legitimate scope of musical art. They had never hitherto even looked through the door which opened upon the domains of human passion. Once it was opened, the subjective art of the church school, and the submissive devotionalism of the church composers, was bound to come rapidly to an end. Men tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the paradise of innocence was thenceforth forbidden them. Monteverde was the man who first tasted and gave his fellow men to eat of the fruit; and from the accounts given of the effect it produced upon them they ate with avidity and craved for more.” Parry gives in illustration of Monteverde’s style a fragment known as “Ariadne’s Lament,” from the opera “Arianna,” so characteristic that it must be reprinted here: [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE IV. “ARIADNE’S LAMENT,” BY MONTEVERDE.] _Lasciatemi morire! Lasciatemi morire! E che volete voi.... che mi conforte_ _In cosi dura sorte, in cosi gran martire? Lasciatemi morire! lasciatemi morire!_