When it comes to opera, I am a late bloomer. My first opera was Tosca, in 2019, followed by Die Fledermaus, both at the Tel Aviv Opera House. My attendance at Armida e Rinaldo, staged last week at the Jerusalem Theatre to a full house, hiked the number to three; therefore, according to the Talmudic principle of hazakah (a legal presumption of continuity), I can officially call myself an opera-goer.
This opera was different from the other two. To begin with, it was produced by the Jerusalem Opera, established in 2011 to fill an opera vacuum in Jerusalem and promote Israeli artists, particularly younger ones. Additionally, unlike Tosca and Fledermaus, this piece had only been performed a single time since its debut, over two centuries ago. Finally, it has a connection with Jerusalem.
Before the performance, Prof. Bella Brover Lubovsky of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance introduced the event, explaining that the opera is based on Italian poet Torquato Tasso’s celebrated 1581 epic poem “Gerusalemme Liberata” (“Jerusalem Delivered”), which she characterized as “The Game of Thrones of the Italian Renaissance.”
Set during the battles of the first Crusaders against local Muslims, the poem describes Jerusalem’s capture by Sir Godfrey de Bouillon and his knights. In one episode, we meet the knight Rinaldo and the witch Armida, who fall in love – a tale rich in romance and angst that has inspired numerous plays, paintings, and operatic adaptations, including this one.
Armida e Rinaldo, with a score composed by Italian Giuseppe Sarti (1729-1802) for an existing libretto by Marco Coltellini, was tailored to the tastes of Sarti’s patron, Russian empress Catherine the Great, with music in the Classical style.
The performance at the Jerusalem Theatre’s Henry Crown Hall was only the second time the opera had been staged since its 1786 debut in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Theatre. The other was in 2002 at the Teatro Masini in Sarti’s hometown of Faenza in Italy.
The opera, lasting under two hours, introduces us to Armida (soprano Maria Mel), a powerful sorceress and Saracen (the Crusader term for local Muslims). Armida seduces Crusader knight Rinaldo (mezzo-soprano Noa Sion – the part, originally written for a castrato, is today typically performed by a female singer) to prevent him from battling against her people. Unexpectedly, she falls in love with him across the partisan divide and transports him to her magical island. The opera begins here, with Rinaldo stripped of his armor, wearing soft white underclothing, and passing the hours in dreamy romance, the war forgotten. That is, until his party-pooper companion Ubaldo (tenor Marc Shaimer) arrives to free him from the spell, demanding rhetorically: “Is this what Jerusalem should expect from you?!” (the only mention of Jerusalem in the opera). Ubaldo holds up his shield to Rinaldo as a mirror of shame, and the Crusader-turned-lover snaps back into awareness of his Christian duty.
However, our poor knight continues to waver, torn between his duty and his love for Armida. She strives to win him back, using magical arts, human sacrifice, and tearful appeals – with her confidante Ismene (soprano Shlomit Lea Kovalsky) attempting to assist – but all in vain. Caught between his paramour and his fellow knight, Rinaldo ultimately chooses duty over love and sails away. In despair, Armida calls upon the infernal goddesses of vengeance to pour rivers of poison upon Rinaldo and tear his heart out of his chest.
Featured also were extensive performances by a choir and dancers. Sarti’s score was beautifully interpreted by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, seated on the right side of the stage and conducted by Omer Arieli. The light and pleasant music, enjoyable to the ear if not tremendously innovative, at times contrasted oddly with the emotionally darker scenes; it did, at points, take on a more serious and somber sound.
The staging and costume designs were the happy result of a close collaboration between director Miriam Camerini and designer Polina Adamov. Camerini notes, “There is a welcome Russian influence in Israel that raises the quality significantly. Polina added tremendously to the project.”
Designs were gorgeous and eye-catching, incorporating technological effects unavailable to the original costumiers, such as fairy lights embedded in foam wigs and an illuminated sailing ship. The costumes clearly represented 18th-century style, with puffy white foam wigs and bustles, yet the transparency of the costumes invited us to look beyond all the fluff to what is real. Indeed, these puffy creatures, resembling the cakes set out on the tables, abruptly stripped down to sleek, frightening black costumes, revealing the demonic nature of Armida’s followers.
As the opera progressed, modern elements made their appearance (pistols, a revolver) as did political messages. Armida’s followers, clad in red burka-like robes, performed a chilling throat-slitting ritual, the victims thrown upon a sacrificial altar.
Most confronting was Rinaldo’s donning of an IDF uniform as he headed back to the Crusades, and the presence of figures bearing placards reading “Revenge,” “Protection,” “Deterrence,” “Ideology,” and so on. These choices prompted a few shouts of criticism during the final applause. Apparently, while for some the connection to today’s Jerusalem in a time of war was appropriate and thought-provoking, others prefer their opera as escapism, undiluted by tough contemporary messages. (For the director’s thoughts, see “Spotlight.”)
As a postscript, I will add that I was also struck throughout by the opera’s motif of awakening from a delightful fantasy of peace and love to the horrible realities of war. For those of us nurturing hopes of peace in the region after the Abraham Accords, Oct. 7 was just such an awakening.■
Spotlight: The director
Director Miriam Camerini is an actor, Jewish scholar, singer, and writer. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Milan, near Sarti’s birthplace of Faenza, she found working on Armida e Rinaldo, an Italian opera rooted in Jerusalem, to be very meaningful.
“I’m usually tagged as the ‘Jewish’ artist; but here, for once, I was the ‘Italian’! This project straddled my two worlds,” she says, smiling. In a serious tone, she adds: “I embraced the responsibility of doing this in the heart of Jerusalem at this unique and politically charged moment. Theater as a distraction, a nice night out, is not the Jewish way; it needs to have social relevance.”
For Camerini, beyond the opera’s apparent theme of “religion vs the devil,” sometimes religion can actually be the devil; hence the scene with the Taliban-type costumes, involving human sacrifice.
“All religions have elements of sacrificing one’s children,” she claims, “and this emerges also in the context of sending them to war. Why is it so natural to choose war? Why abandon your beloved for a battle?” For her, a telling point in the opera is the demons’ accusation that Ubaldo is a pathetic bringer of war – and his retort that their so-called love for life is a façade, for they just as easily turn to violence as he does.
Regarding the placards, Camerini explains: “The words were carefully chosen, to range from ‘Defense’ (Ismene’s preference), to the middle way of ‘Deterrence,’ to ‘Revenge’ (Armida’s choice). Ultimately, the whole world becomes deluged, and the only thing left is the placards because demonstrations are all we have left to try to stop this war.” She clarifies, too, that the use of the army uniform was not (as some might think) intended to directly equate the IDF with the bloodthirsty, antisemitic Crusaders, but rather as an analogy, to explore commonalities and differences.
As the audience, we were challenged to reflect on these questions. As Ubaldo’s shield/mirror was deliberately flashed into our eyes – another interesting directorial choice – the stage momentarily vanished, leaving only ourselves and our thoughts.