“It would perhaps be more correct to describe this romance of the Crusades [Franz Gluck’s Armide] . . . not as a ‘decorative’ but as a ‘spectacle’ opera, for Armida’s magically transformed garden and the holocaust at the end, when her palace goes up in flames, bring to mind Parsifal and Gotterdammerung.”

—Leslie Horry, from A Concise History of Opera, 1972.