Dvořák’s Armida debuts at Prague’s National Theater on 19 May.
The production of Armida will be the first to be conducted by Robert Jindra since he assumed the post of music director of the National Theatre Opera.
After nine years, the National Theatre will welcome back Jiří Heřman, whose sophisticated and visually forcible productions have made him one of the most acclaimed and most sought-after Czech opera directors of the past few decades.
Four-act Armida is set to a libretto by Jaroslav Vrchlický that was originally based on Torquato Tasso’s epic La Gerusalemme liberata.Dvořák’s opera was first performed at Prague’s National Theatre on 25 March 1904; the score was published as opus 115 in 1941.
Armida represents the culmination of Dvořák’s experimentation with a Wagnerian style of opera composition, though much of the music belongs to Dvořák’s own genre. Vrchlický’s libretto parallels the one that Philippe Quinault wrote for Jean-Baptiste Lully in their opera of the same name.
