• Antonín Dvořák. Opera in four acts. 1903.
• Libretto by Jaroslav Vrchlichký, after an episode in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.
• First performance at the National Theatre, Prague, on 25th March 1904.

In a Czech version of Tasso’s narrative, Armida is sent to distract Rinald and his comrades from an attack on Damascus. In love, they try to elope from the camp of the crusaders, and are spirited away eventually by the sorcerer Ismen. It is he who provides the magic shield so that his comrades who have come in search of Rinald may bring him to his senses, allowing him to rejoin battle with the enemy and to kill Ismen. In combat Rinald also kills Armida, who, like Clorinda in the Tasso story of Tancredi and Clorinda, dies penitent and seeking conversion.

The subject of Dvořák’s Armida appealed, no doubt, through its treatment of conflict between Christian and non-Christian and between love and duty. The opera enjoyed no great success and the composer was by then too ill to sit through the whole of the first performance on 25th March 1904. He died on 1st May.