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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.
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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.
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.
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Antonio Maria Gasparo Gioacchino Sacchini was an Italian classical era composer, best known for his operas.
La Bayadère is an 1877 ballet, originally staged in four acts and seven tableaux by the French choreographer Marius Petipa to music by Ludwig Minkus and libretto by Sergei Khudekov. The ballet was staged 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 hailed by contemporary critics and audiences as one of the choreographer Petipa's masterpieces, particularly the scene of act II The Kingdom of the Shades, which is one of the most celebrated pieces in all of classical ballet.
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.
Cinderella is a ballet-féerie in three acts, with the choreography of Enrico Cecchetti and Lev Ivanov supervised by Marius Petipa. Music is by Baron Boris Fitinhoff-Schell; the libretto is by Lidia Pashkova and Ivan Vsevolozhsky. It was first presented by the Imperial Ballet on 17 December [O.S. 5 December] 1893 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire.
Raymonda is a grand ballet in three acts, four scenes with an apotheosis, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa to the music of Alexander Glazunov and libretto by Lydia Pashkova. Raymonda was created especially for the benefit performance of the prima ballerina Pierina Legnani, and first presented by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre on 19 January [O.S. 7 January] 1898 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Among the ballet's most celebrated passages is the Pas classique hongrois from the third act, which is often performed independently.
Armida is a 1784 opera in three acts by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, set to an Italian-language libretto taken from Antonio Tozzi's 1775 opera Rinaldo, as amended by Nunziato Porta, and ultimately based on the story of Armida and Rinaldo in Torquato Tasso's poem Gerusalemme liberata.
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.
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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.
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)