Passacaille from Armide

Sorcerers were a favorite character in Greek and Roman literature. To wit, Circe, the sorceress of the Homeric Odyssey who turned men into captive beasts. Her myth thrived throughout classical and medieval times, even inspiring various renderings into the European renaissance. In fact, Circe was the model for a new sorceress who emerged in the 16th-century epic Jerusalem Delivered (1581) by Torquato Tasso. Organized as a series of episodes related to the First Crusade, Tasso’s sprawling tale spends more time exploring marginal amorous intrigues, including the story of Armida and Rinaldo. Armida, an Arab sorceress, fails in her mission to destroy the invading Christians when she falls in love with the valiant and handsome Rinaldo, purported founder of the Italian house of d’Este. Rather than strike Rinaldo down, Armide uses her magic to entrance him. He is eventually restored to his senses by fellow Crusaders and abandons Armide, who joins Dido of Carthage among the forlorn leading women of literature.
The tale forms the basis of many operas from Monteverdi to the present day. Among the earliest is a 1686 version by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), court composer to Louis XIV. The king himself suggested the story of Armide and Rinaldo to Lully, and the latter obliged with a scintillating, five-act masterpiece. It was revived for many future seasons at Versailles and beyond before being supplanted by more contemporary settings from Vivaldi, Salieri, and Gluck. Lully opens Armide with the conventional Overture, typifying the very features that have given such movements the designation of “French overture.” This is a three-part structure in which regal gestures, marked by dotted rhythms and subtle chromatic touches, surround the central contrapuntal section taken at a faster tempo. Hints of the A section infuse the fugal subject, thus drawing the two parts more tightly together.
Another of the opera’s highlights is the Passacaille from Act 5. A passacaglia, to use its more common Italian name, was an established form favored in the Baroque. Its basic premise features a recurring melodic (and sometimes harmonic) pattern that repeats multiple times, each repetition offering chances for variation, ornamentation, and changes in mood and orchestration. Armide’s passacaglia in G minor vacillates between full ensemble and passages reduced to just three players (flutes with violin). Adding to its charm is the repeated chord progression, a stepwise descent from the tonic to the dominant in minor mode. The technical terms may not resonate, but this familiar “lament bass” progression is one of the most commonly used passacaglia ideas. The entire ten-minute episode begins in the orchestra but flows without pause into a section featuring chorus. Lully brilliantly fuses instrumental and vocal textures while maintaining the dramatic momentum of the passacaglia. The entire scene takes a very congenial view of Rinaldo’s situation (he is a prisoner, after all), and the chorus is here simply to divert him while Armide skips off to consult with underworld oracles.

(c) Jason Stell