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Armida is the fictional character of a Saracen sorceress, created by the Italian late Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2011) |
Armida is the fictional character of a Saracen sorceress, created by the Italian late Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso.
In Tasso's epic Jerusalem Delivered (Italian: Gerusalemme liberata), Rinaldo is a fierce and determined warrior who is also honorable and handsome. Armida has been sent to stop the Christians from completing their mission and is about to murder the sleeping soldier, but instead she falls in love. She creates an enchanted garden where she holds him a lovesick prisoner. Eventually Charles and Ubaldo, two of his fellow Crusaders, find him and hold a shield to his face, so he can see his image and remember who he is. Rinaldo barely can resist Armida's pleadings, but his comrades insist that he return to his Christian duties. At the close of the poem, when the pagans have lost the final battle, Rinaldo, remembering his promise to be her champion, prevents her from giving way to her suicidal impulses and offers to restore her to her lost throne. She gives in at this and like the other Saracen woman, Clorinda, earlier in the piece, becomes a Christian and his "handmaid".
Many painters and composers were inspired by Tasso's tale. The works that resulted often added or subtracted an element; Tasso himself continued to edit the story for years. In some versions, Armida is converted to Christianity, in others, she rages and destroys her own enchanted garden.
She occupies a place in the literature of abandoned women such as the tragic Dido, who committed suicide, and the evil Circe, whom Odysseus abandoned to return home, but she is considered by many to be more human and thus more compelling and sympathetic than either of them.
The story of Armida and Rinaldo has been the basis for a number of operas:
On 1 May 2010, Rossini's Armida was performed and broadcast live to theaters around the world in the series MetLive in HD. [1]
Johannes Brahms composed a cantata entitled Rinaldo based on the story.
Renaud de Montauban was a legendary hero and knight which appeared in a 12th-century Old French chanson de geste known as The Four Sons of Aymon. The four sons of Duke Aymon are Renaud, Richard, Alard and Guiscard, and their cousin is the magician Maugris. Renaud possesses the magical horse Bayard and the sword Froberge.
Armide is an opera in five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully. The libretto by Philippe Quinault is based on Torquato Tasso's poem La Gerusalemme liberata. The work is in the form of a tragédie en musique, a genre invented by Lully and Quinault.
Rinaldo is an opera by George Frideric Handel, composed in 1711, and was the first Italian language opera written specifically for the London stage. The libretto was prepared by Giacomo Rossi from a scenario provided by Aaron Hill, and the work was first performed at the Queen's Theatre in London's Haymarket on 24 February 1711. The story of love, war and redemption, set at the time of the First Crusade, is loosely based on Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, and its staging involved many original and vivid effects. It was a great success with the public, despite negative reactions from literary critics hostile to the contemporary trend towards Italian entertainment in English theatres.
Orlando Innamorato is an epic poem written by the Italian Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo. The poem is a romance concerning the heroic knight Orlando (Roland). It was published between 1483 and 1495.
Jerusalem Delivered, also known as The Liberation of Jerusalem, is an epic poem by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, first published in 1581, that tells a largely mythified version of the First Crusade in which Christian knights, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, battle Muslims in order to take Jerusalem. Tasso began work on the poem in the mid-1560s. Originally, it bore the title Il Goffredo. It was completed in April, 1575 and that summer the poet read his work to Duke Alfonso of Ferrara and Lucrezia, Duchess of Urbino. A pirate edition of 14 cantos from the poem appeared in Venice in 1580. The first complete editions of Gerusalemme liberata were published in Parma and Ferrara in 1581.
Antonio Maria Gasparo Gioacchino Sacchini was an Italian composer, best known for his operas.
La Bayadère is a ballet, originally staged in four acts and seven tableaux by French choreographer Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Minkus. The ballet was staged especially for the benefit performance of the Russian Prima ballerina Ekaterina Vazem, who created the principal role of Nikiya. La Bayadère was first presented by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1877. From the first performance the ballet was universally hailed by contemporary critics as one of the choreographer Petipa's supreme masterpieces, particularly the scene from the ballet known as The Kingdom of the Shades, which became one of the most celebrated pieces in all of classical ballet. By the turn of the 20th century, The Kingdom of the Shades scene was regularly extracted from the full-length work as an independent showpiece, and it has remained so to the present day.
The French musical ensemble Les Talens Lyriques was created in 1991 in Paris, France, by the harpsichordist and orchestral conductor Christophe Rousset. This instrumental and vocal formation derives its name from the subtitle of Les fêtes d'Hébé (1739) an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Raymonda is a ballet in three acts, four scenes with an apotheosis, choreographed by Marius Petipa to music by Alexander Glazunov, his Opus 57. It was first presented by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre on 19 January [O.S. 7 January] 1898 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The ballet was created especially for the benefit performance of the Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani, who created the title role. Among the ballet's most celebrated passages is the Pas classique hongrois from the third act, which is often performed independently.
Armida is an operatic dramma per musica by Antonio Salieri in three acts, set to a libretto by Marco Coltellini. The plot is based on the epic poem Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso. Lully, Handel and Traetta, to name but a few, had already composed operas based on the situations that Tasso originally developed. The plot of all of these, and Salieri's work, is based on the relationship between Armida and the Crusader Rinaldo.
Armida is an opera in three acts by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, set to a libretto based upon Torquato Tasso's poem Gerusalemme liberata. The first performance was 26 February 1784 and it went on to receive 54 performances from 1784 to 1788 at the Esterháza Court Theatre. During the composer's lifetime it was also performed in Pressburg, Budapest, Turin and Vienna. Haydn himself regarded Armida as his finest opera. Armida then disappeared from the general operatic repertoire; it was revived in 1968 in a concert rendition in Cologne, and later a production in Bern. The United States premiere of the opera was given at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire, with the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra for the Monadnock Music Festival in September 1981. Sarah Reese sang the title role; the director Peter Sellars set the production during the Vietnam War.
Armida is an opera seria in three acts with music by Antonio Sacchini set to a libretto by Jacopo Durandi, based on the epic poem Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso. The opera was first performed during the 1772 Carnival season at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan.
Armida is an opera in three acts by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini to an Italian libretto by Giovanni Schmidt, based on scenes from Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso.
Armida Abbandonata is an opera in three acts by the Italian composer Niccolò Jommelli. The libretto, by Francesco Saverio De Rogatis, is based on the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. The opera was first performed at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, on 30 May 1770. The young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in the audience. He described the work as "beautiful but too serious and old-fashioned for the theatre". Nevertheless, despite a lukewarm reception at its premiere, Armida abbandonata was widely performed throughout Italy in the following years.
Caterina Gabrielli, born Caterina Fatta, was an Italian coloratura singer. She was the most important soprano of her age. A woman of great personal charm and dynamism, Charles Burney referred to her as "the most intelligent and best-bred virtuosa" that he had ever encountered. The excellence of her vocal artistry is reflected in the fact that she was able to secure long-term engagements in three of the most prestigious operatic centers in her day outside of Italy.
Armida is a beautiful enchantress in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
Armida is an opera by British composer Judith Weir. It premiered on 25 December 2005 as a television broadcast on the UK station, Channel 4 which had commissioned the work. The English libretto, also written by Weir, is loosely based on the story of Rinaldo and Armida, in Torquato Tasso's 1581 epic poem set in the First Crusade, La Gerusalemme liberata.
Renaud is an opera by Antonio Sacchini, first performed on 28 February 1783 by the Académie Royale de Musique at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. It takes the form of a tragédie lyrique in three acts. The French libretto, by Jean-Joseph Lebœuf, is based on Cantos XVII and XX of Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata and, more directly, on the five-act tragedy by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, Renaud, ou La suite d'Armide, which had been set to music by Henri Desmarets in 1722 and was intended as a sequel to Lully's famous opera Armide. According to Théodore Lajarte, Lebœuf was helped by Nicolas-Étienne Framery, the regular translator of Sacchini's libretti.
Renaud, ou La suite d'Armide is an opera by the French composer Henri Desmarets, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique on 5 March 1722. It takes the form of a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts. The libretto, by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, is based on Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. The opera is a sequel to Jean-Baptiste Lully's Armide (1686).
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Wood, James, ed. (1907). The Nuttall Encyclopædia . London and New York: Frederick Warne.{{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)