“Armida” by Gioachino Rossini

Notes on the Libretto

Rossini’s Armida, first performed at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1817, sets a libretto by Giovanni Schmidt drawn from the celebrated episode of Rinaldo and Armida in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Its language retains much of the elevated vocabulary of heroic opera, but beneath that formality lies a strikingly direct conflict between love, honor, and enchantment.

In preparing the Italian–English side-by-side text, several expressions required more than literal translation. When Ubaldo confronts the enchanted Rinaldo with the adamantine shield, “Mira di tua virtù tutto l’eccesso” is deliberately bitter: a literal “behold the excess of your virtue” sounds almost complimentary. The sense is closer to “see to what extreme your valor has fallen,” as Rinaldo is forced to recognize his own degradation.

A smaller phrase in Armida’s desperate appeal is equally revealing. Offering to follow Rinaldo as a servant, she promises “raccorcerò la chioma”: not merely to arrange or bind her hair, but to cut it short, an outward surrender of her royal identity. Such details become especially important in the final act, where Schmidt’s language repeatedly opposes the imagery of servitude—chains, captivity, submission—to Rinaldo’s recovered martial honor. The English translation therefore aims to preserve not only the argument of each line, but these recurring contrasts upon which the drama depends.