Armida - Traetta, Salieri and Righini in Vienna

No other musical genre has provoked as much vehement discussion throughout its history as opera. This study is a historical and musical narrative about a certain genre of operas, exemplified by three treatments of the same subject, created in the same city over a span of about twenty years. The subject is the love story of Armida and Rinaldo, taken from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. The location is Vienna, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and genre is Viennese Italian reform operas. The three works are Traetta’s Armida, libretto by Durazzo and Miglivacca (1761), Salieri’s Armida, text by Coltellini (1771), and the Armida of Righini (1782), text by Coltellini as well. The purpose of such a study is not only to add information to the coffers of eighteenth-century opera scholarship, but also to explore the complex relationship between text and music in this sub-genre of opera, in particular the alliance of specific keys with different textual themes, and musical features.