Rinaldo, mascolinità epica (e melodrammatica)

Speranza
Sleeping with the enemy

Lesbian frissons, love across the battle lines, sorcery, a severed head...no wonder the story of Rinaldo and Armida has found its way into so many operas

In 1581, a book was published in Parma, northern Italy, that changed the history of western culture.

"La Gerusalemme Liberata", an epic poem some 600 pages long, was the work of Torquato Tasso, court poet to Alfonso d'Este, Duca di Ferrara.

Massive in its scope, and fusing metaphysical depth with psychological profundity, it is a towering achievement, equalled only by the works of Dante, Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

Yet the history of the poem's beginnings is also a tale of psychological catastrophe.

Tasso, a devout Catholic, developed a guilty obsession with his own work.

Tasso indeed completed "La Gerusalemme Liberata" in 1575 but, by the time it appeared, had repudiated the text on the grounds that it was immoral and irreligious.

Soon, he began to exhibit signs of pathological disturbance.

On one occasion, he suddenly knifed one of his servants.

On March 11 1579, his 35th birthday, he lost control again, showering Alfonso, to whom the poem is dedicated, with invective.

The Duca promptly had him flung into prison, and he was not relased until 1586.

He spent his last years feverishly rewriting his poem, which he retitled "La Gerusalemme Conquistata".

He died in 1595.

The original version had made Tasso famous all over Europe.

Tasso wanted none of the adulation, and went to his grave believing that he had unleashed on the world a work of uncontainable eroticism.

And he was right.

For more than three centuries, "La Gerusalemme Liberata" dominated the European erotic imagination, even though it contains not a single explicit description of sexual activity.

We know nothing of Tasso's own sex life, though what gives the poem its force is an element of imaginative bisexuality - no other writer glories in the bodies of both sexes to such an extent.

The limits of gender and orientation are continuously fractured in Tasso.

Add to this an almost sadomasochistic entwining of images of sex and war, and you have an inflammatory combination.

Even more remarkable is the fact that this sexual configuration is found in an ostensibly religious work.


1099.

The poem is set in 1099 during the final months of the First Crusade, when Jerusalem fell to a besieging Christian army under Goffredo di  Bouillon.

One of its central themes is the effect of sexuality on this male-bonded unit, which buckles under its influence.

Torquato Tasso involves a number of his soldiers in interlocking erotic episodes, two of which come to dominate the work in its entirety.

The first concerns Tancredi and his encounters with the glittering enemy, Amazon Clorinda, whom he adores off the battlefield and savages on it, believing her, when she is armed, to be a man.

--- RINALDO ED ARMIDA

The second portrays the relationship between Rinaldo and the sorceress Armida, a coupling so powerful it became mythic.

Armida, above all, took on iconographic status as a male-projected image of female sexuality, inspiring countless paintings and over 100 operas and ballets.

Claiming Circe and Cleopatra as her antecedents, Torquato Tasso presents Armida as a charismatic woman whose sexuality is manifested in the controlling power of magic, its force gradually becoming redundant as she herself recognises the nature of her own erotic desire.

The niece of Hidraort, pagan king of Damasco, Armida is dispatched by her uncle to sow dissent in the Christian camp, where she arrives claiming that she is a dispossessed princess seeking protection.

Goffredo apart, the soldiers are soon squabbling over her and, when Goffredo unwillingly announces that 10 of his men may help her to reclaim her territory, fights break out as to who is to go.

Eventually the 10 are chosen by lot, only to be lured by Armida to a castle on the Dead Sea, where she keeps them imprisoned, turning them by sorcery from men into fish and back again.

These ten soldiers are rescued, however, by Rinaldo, a disaffected knight who has fled the army after killing a fellow officer in a brawl.

Armida vengefully traps him by magic, intent on murdering him.

When she looks on his prostrate, unconscious body, however, Armida realises that she loves Rinaldo, and transports him to "the Fortunate Isles" off the coast of Africa, where the pair enjoy an initially unbroken erotic idyll in the grounds of an enchanted palace summoned up by her magic.

Goffredo, meanwhile, having had a vision that Gerusalemme cannot be taken without Rinaldo's aid, sends two of his soldiers in pursuit.

Armed with a magic staff that wards off Armida's spirit guards, and a diamond mirror that awakens reason in all who look into it, they penetrate the sorceress's kingdom and break her spell.

Rinaldo returns to the Christian army, while Armida, in whom desire and hate are now in conflict, flees to the enemy forces, offering her body to any man who can kill Rinaldo and bring her his severed head.

During the final battle, however, Rinaldo slaughters her soldiers and the pair finally come face to face.

Her magic diminished through realisation of her own erotic desire, the sight of Rinaldo brings her to despair and she contemplates committing suicide.

IN LOVE WITH ARMIDA, Rinaldo prevents her from doing so.

At the end, the lovers have reached an uneasy truce, with Rinaldo offering Armida marriage on the proviso that she converts to Christianity.

"Do what you want with me," is all she can say to him, in broken, exhausted replies.

Tasso, like Shakespeare and Mozart, leaves relationships open, in cliff-hanging irresolution.

In Rinaldo and Armida, concepts of gender are obliterated.

Rinaldo and Armida combine gender role reversal with hints of lesbianism.

Armida, the active partner, describes Rinaldo as "impenetrable".

Once Rinaldo has reached her enchanted island, however, Rinaldo gets shot of his armour, wreathes flowers round his sword and dons women's clothes.

The image that confronts Goffredo's soldiers when they come to claim him is of two women lying on the lawn in post-coital slumber.

Yet Tasso's portrait of Armida also contained elements that ensured her a life beyond the context of the poem.

She is, first and foremost, one of literature's great tragic heroines.

Abandoned by Rinaldo, she lets fly an astonishing tirade of grief, sorrow and rage, an extraordinary poetic lament matched only by Shakespeare's depiction of Cleopatra's desolation at Antony's death and the anguish of Racine's Fedra.

Tasso also clothes Armida in imagery that derives from art forms beyond the printed page.

Her castle on the Dead Sea is a "theatre", where she arranges her captive soldiers in tableaux, like a seasoned director.

Armida's palace on the enchanted Fortunate Isles is an idealised Renaissance architectural masterpiece filled with sculpture and paintings.

Armida's magic is music itself.

Rinaldo is first captured by the siren sound of her singing.

Birds in Armida's garden warble madrigals.

At one point, Tasso breaks off the lament to compare the modulations of her voice with those of a singer.

Armida is herself, in other words, an artist within an art work, and ever since the appearance of "La Gerusalemme Liberata", generations of creative artists have struggled in their turn either to visualise her world or to give her unheard music its voice.

TIEPOLO, VILLA VALMARANA, VICENZA

Just as Tasso lures us into her palace, past painted images of great lovers of antiquity, so Tiepolo draws us through the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza with Armida's story.

Angelica Kauffmann depicts her with Rinaldo hovering at her lap in a gesture of sexual submission.

RINALDIANA OPERISTICA

The Italian madrigalists were soon setting sections of the great lament.

It was not long before the sorceress was weaving her spell on the operatic stage.

Musical interpretations of her legend vary.

Few composers attempted to set the story in its entirety.

Most, avoiding Tasso's ending, take the lament as their closing point, furthering Armida's tragic status.

Giovanni Battista Lulli, in 1686, shrouded her in baroque pageantry.

A century later, Cristoforo Gluck (Parigi) enfolded the lovers in psychodrama, their prevarications between desire and repression pre-empting Wagner's Tristan und Isolde -- or "Parsifal".

Gluck's music for the love scenes is shamelessly sexy.

"If I am damned in the afterlife, it will be for that," Gluck said, echoing Tasso's own guilt.

Other composers made the attempt, then drew back querulously from portraying Armida's sexuality, producing versions that glance off Tasso rather than embodying him.

Giorgio Frederico Handel, who set Tasso's "Il Lamento d'Armida" indeed already as a "Cantata" during his Italian apprenticeship, conquered London with his "Rinaldo" (with librettist G. Rossi, at the Mercato di Fieno) in which Tasso turns comic - the joke being that none of Armida's ploys have any effect on Rinaldo whatsoever.  

Rossini's version, first performed in Naples in 1817, is one of the most remarkable operatic adaptations.

It is also, after Gluck's masterpiece, the greatest.

The score infamously requires six tenors to portray the principal figures in Goffredo's army.

Rossini's deployment of them, however, cannily echoes Tasso's poem.

They function as a bonded unit, one barely distinguishable from another, until Armida appears on the scene.

As Armida's seductive coloratura begins to take effect, they become jealously differentiated, competing with her in vocal prowess.

The title role represents Rossini's most extreme glamorisation of the soprano voice.

"This," Armida sings, "is the centre of pleasure," before she unleashes a torrent of sound, weaving her spell around Rinaldo in an aria that covers nearly three octaves.

It is a devastating moment in an opera that captures both the danger and allure of one of the most remarkable of all works of literature.

Tasso, one suspects, would have hated it, but Rossini's opera forms a fitting tribute to one of the greatest writers that ever lived and the extraordinary heroine he created.