Organization

Wexford Festival Opera

Conductor

Norbert Baxa

Singer

Libuse Santorisova

A nymph

Set designer

Hartmut Schörghofer

Costume designer

Bass

Jozef Benci

Hydraot

Soprano

Jennifer Davis

Armida

Jan Hnyk

Petr

Baritone

Rory Dunne

Bohumir

Tenor

Gerard Schneider

Rinald

Seán Boylan

Muezzin

Josef Moravec

Sven

Josef Kovačič

Ubald

Siren

Stanisław Kuflyuk

Ismen

Chris Mosz

Dudo

Stage director

Assistant Lighting Designer

Daisy Long

Assistant Stage Director

Monika Hliněnská

Video designer

Raffaele Acquaviva

Lighting designer

D M Wood

J K Tyl Theatre

češčina

Wexford

Ireland

O’Reilly Theatre

Armida Dvořák,A

Public

Private

angleščina

Approved

Armida is based, unusually for a 20th-century opera, on a source that was especially popular in 17th- and 18th-century operas. Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, a largely mythified account of the Crusades, tells the story of the love of the Saracen sorceress Armida for the Christian warrior Rinaldo. It inspired around 100 operas and ballets — most famously operas by Handel, Gluck, Haydn. There was a late flowering of interest in the story in Rossini’s Armida in 1817, and then almost a century later Dvořák turned his attention to it.

His Armida was premiered four years after the much more famous Rusalka, with the same soprano creating both title roles. The difficult-to-understand aspect of the opera’s neglect has to do with Dvořák’s music, some of it very characteristic of the composer’s finest work — especially the music of his American period. It also represents the peak of his admiration for Wagner and to be fair, with its cast of Christian knights pitted against a pagan magician and female sorceress, to say nothing of an enchanted garden, Parsifal is not the most improbable model.

So it is fair to conclude that its neglect has more to do with the old-fashioned nature of the libretto — a throwback to Quinault’s text for Lully’s Armide — and it is hardly surprising that the story found little favour in fin de siècle Prague, where the opera was premiered in 1904. Although the librettist Vrchlický — a poet nominated for the Nobel Prize eight times — had already translated the whole of Gerusalemme liberata into Czech, it’s fair to say that he was better at oratorio texts than opera librettos. Not since his first opera, Alfred, had Dvořák set a non-Slavonic subject, making this perhaps something of a surprise turning in his last opera, but a fascinating one nonetheless.

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