Act II of the original version of the opera is now lost.Ĭomplete recording with a restored version of Act II:

Armida was revived for the Carnival season of 1738, with much of the music rewritten, and arias by Leonardo Leo added. Unlike the more than 50 operas based on the romance of Rinaldo and Armida, Vivaldi's version starts during previous events before the war against the Crusaders. Vivaldi's version is different from the more than 50 operas whose themes derive in varying degrees from the story of Rinaldo and Armida in Torquato Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata ( Jerusalem Delivered). It was first performed during the Carnival season of 1718 at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice. Armida al campo d'Egitto is an opera in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi to a libretto by Giovanni Palazzo. Salieri's librettist Marco Coltellini reduced the plot to three main characters. Originally from the Republic of Venice, Antonio Salieri was to quickly pursue a career at the Viennese court and become one of the most important players in Viennese musical life of his time, but historically always remained hidden by Mozart's shadow. In Vienna in 1771 a young Italian composer also turned to the subject and composed his first major opera for the Burgtheater at the age of twenty. Jean-Baptiste Lully and Christoph Willibald Gluck put the sorceress on the Parisian opera stage, Luigi Cherubini and Gioachino Rossini gave her her Italian form, and Antonín Dvořák wrote his last opera Armida in Czech in 1904 for the Prague National Theater. In Handel's Rinaldo, she is the main female character as well as in Vivaldi's Armida al campo d’Egitto. In Torquato Tasso's knight epic La Gerusalemme liberata, Armida was commissioned by her uncle to prevent the crusaders from conquering Jerusalem with all the magical and female arts at their disposal.

Armida, the beautiful niece of the ruler of Damascus, stimulated the imagination of composers of the 18th century like no other sorceress.

Vivaldi armida