Armide in Paris

Abstract

Philippe Quinault's libretto for Armide, so much admired (and only slightly amended) by Gluck for his 1777 Paris success, had its origins in the tragédie en musique by Jean-Baptiste Lully, composed in 1685–6. Although neither Quinault nor Lully were to suspect it at the time, Armide turned out to be their last as well as their most successful collaboration. As with all their operas, it was always the text of Quinault that attracted as much comment or criticism as Lully's music; the subject and much of the libretto itself was approved by the king's Petite Académie before any music was written, and composer and librettist worked together throughout the compositional process. Armide was particularly admired both at the time of its creation and for long afterwards for the monologue in recitative in Act 2 (cited by Rameau as a model of the genre) and especially for its dénouement, in which Armide, unsuccessful in overcoming the warrior Renaud, and bent on vengeance, invokes her powers to bring her palace crashing down in ruins, a scene long regarded as of unsurpassable emotional intensity (and one which called for, naturally enough, ingenuity on the part of the stage machinists, something which their audiences had long come to expect).