The Lamento della ninfa, included by Monteverdi in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638), has been a focus of hot debate over aesthetic and expressive issues in the composer's Venetian secular music. It was identified by Ellen Rosand in 1979 as a prototypical example of a ground-bass pattern moving from tonic to dominant through a descending minor tetrachord – the so-called ‘emblem of lament’ that then, in diatonic or chromatic form, and with or without a cadential extension, permeated Baroquemusic, via Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (Dido's concluding ‘When I am laid in earth’) to the Crucifixus of Bach's B minor Mass, even extending into the Classical period and beyond (the opening of Mozart's D minor string quartet, K. 421). In 1987, Gary Tomlinson sought to reconcile his disparaging view of Monteverdi's apparent decline from Renaissance subtlety into Baroque sterility with his undoubted sense of the power of this ‘through-composed dramatic scena’: the Lamento della ninfa is ‘a brilliant anomaly’ – ‘In it, from the foundation of Marinism, with materials touched bymemories of lighter styles, Monteverdi erected an enduring monument to the Petrarchism of his youth.’ In 1991, Susan McClary picked up on Tomlinson's notion of it being a ‘dramatic scena’ and explored the piece as a prototypical (again) mad-scene, worthy of comparison with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Richard Strauss's Salome, and Schoenberg's Erwartung.