‘What enchanting Sound salutes my Ear?’: Gerusalemme liberata and the early development of opera in England

Abstract

By the 1620s, the romantic episodes in Gerusalemme liberata had become popular as a source for operatic libretti. The story of Rinaldo and Armida proved to be the most popular, and eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, this phenomenon had reached the stage in England, via Italy, France and even Germany. The fourth chapter explores ambitious musical adaptations of the episode for the London stage in the native form of dramatic opera in John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida: A Tragedy (1699), with music by John Eccles, and in the through-sung Italianate form in Handel’s Rinaldo, with a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, first performed to great acclaim in 1711. It will also examine the idiosyncratic interpretation, by Paolo Rolli, of a different romantic episode in Tasso, that of Erminia and Tancredi, as the source for another Italianate London opera, Giovanni Bononcini’s L’Erminia favola Boschereccia (1723). These musical works founded, often closely but sometimes more freely, on the Italian poem demonstrate the breadth of Tasso’s impact in England, both chronologically and across a range of art forms.