Armide Plot Summary

Armide Performance History

• Title from title page: ARMIDE / TRAGEDIE / MISE / EN MUSIQUE
• Genre: tragédie lyrique (Tragédie en musique)
• Siglum from Lully thematic catalog: LWV71
• Composer: Jean-Baptiste Lully, 1632-1687
• Librettist: Philippe Quinault, 1635-1688
• Libretto based on: Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata
• Setting: Damascus, during the First Crusade
• Premiere: Paris, Opéra, 15 February 1686
• First published: Paris, Christophe Ballard, 1686
• Volumes in the UNT Lully Collection: Manuscript (undated) 1st ed. (Ballard 1686)

For further reading on Armide, we suggest:

• Lois Rosow, Lully's Armide at the Paris Opera: A Performance History: 1686-1766, Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1981.
  
• Article on Lully's Armide by Lois Rosow in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (vol. 1, pp. 200-204).
• Reckow, Fritz. "'Cacher l'Art par l'Art meme': Lullys Armide-Monolog und die Kunst des Vergebens," in Analysen: Beitrage zu einer Problemgeschichte des Komponierens. Festschrift fur Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Breig, Reinhold Brinkmann, and Elmar Budde. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984, p. 128-57. Supplement to Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 23.
• Lois Rosow, "How eighteenth-century Parisians heard Lully's operas: The case of Armide's fourth act," in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the music of the French Baroque: essays in honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. XX-XXX.