ABSTRACT
In recent studies, the question of Christoph Willibald Gluck's continuation of the tradition of Jean Baptiste Lully's and Jean-Philippe Rameau's tragedies has been reduced to comparisons between the two versions of Armide, and in particular of the monologue "Enfm il est en ma puissance." Gluck's claim to have provided music specific to the individual characters is confirmed in the dialogue between Armide and Renaud at the beginning of Act V. Each voice keeps to its own melodic/motivic material up until the point at which the scene becomes an actual duet. Jacques Martine praised Gluck's recitative highly: "The recitatif oblige, to which Gluck ordinarily gives so much character, has perhaps even more of it, especially in Iphigenie's dream and the terror of Thoas. In the opera's divertissements, which even include double chorus, Gluck created immense tableaux in which he followed the Lullian tradition directly and used reprises to shape them as integrated musical structures.
