One of Monteverde’s most important works in this style is the _Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda (Combattimento di Tancredi e di Clorinda)_ a poem by Tasso, which is noteworthy for several new things. In the preface of the published edition, Monteverde says that he had long tried to invent a style _concitato_, or agitated, that he had been struck by the fact that musicians had never tried to express anger or the fury of battle, but had expressed only tenderness and sweetness, sadness or gayety. (Perhaps he did not know Jannequin’s _Battle of Marignan_.) So he wrote battle music. The second innovation was the tremolo, which, however familiar to us today, he used for the first time to express agitation, anger and fear, and the musicians were so surprised to see something that they had never seen before, that they refused to play it! This was neither the first nor the last time that musicians balked at something new. The third innovation was that he wrote independent parts for the orchestra, and for the first time the instruments did not “copy” the voice, but had notes all to themselves to play. In 1630 there was a terrible epidemic in Venice, the “Black Plague” which lasted a year and took off one-third of her population! In gratitude for having been spared, Monteverde became a priest in the Church. This did not seem to interfere with his composing secular works, for after this, he wrote several operas. Venice was the home of the first public opera house in the world! It was opened (1637) in the San Cassiano theatre by Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Manelli, and for this in these last years of his life, Monteverde wrote some of his most important operas. Monteverde’s operas of this time were a combination of the Roman _opera-cantate_, then in style, and his first operas, _Orfeo_ and _Arianna_, written thirty-five years before. He had great enough genius to fit his work to the conditions that he found in the opera house, so that when they had to reduce expenses, Monteverde cut down the size of his orchestra to just a clavichord, a few theorbos, a bass viol and a few violins and viols, and wrote works without choruses! He was agreeable, wasn’t he? A thing which people of “near” greatness rarely are!