Ex. 6-2: On s'étonnerait moins que la saison nouvelle

From the second act of Gluck's opera Armide, first staged in Paris in 1777. In this scene, the witch Armide wants to trap the knight Renaud. She commands magical servants who disguise themselves as shepherds and fairies; they sing and dance to put him into a magic sleep and tie him up with chains of flowers. This gentle song is sung by one of them, a shepherdess. The words praise youth and the pleasures of love.

Gluck set a libretto that the poet Philippe Quinault had written almost a century earlier, in 1686, for an Armide by Jean-Baptiste Lully. Gluck kept Quinault's words almost unchanged but composed entirely new music, so the very same text is sung in both Lully's and Gluck's operas. The story comes from Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered.

From the album Gluck: Armide by Nicole Heaston, Les Musiciens du Louvre and Marc Minkowski (1999)
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