As described in Tasso’s sprawling Renaissance epic of the Crusades, the Syrian Queen Armida eats Christian knights for dessert. Undaunted, Rinaldo, the bravest of them all, sets out to deprogram his comrades in the clutches of this latter-day Circe—and winds up turning the tables on her. During the reign of Louis XIV, the Italian-born Jean-Baptiste Lully’s setting of Philippe Quinault’s libretto on this subject propelled French Baroque opera to its apogee. Nine decades later, Marie-Antoinette’s German-born protégé Christoph Willibald Gluck gave Quinault a rapturous makeover in his less formal, more fluent style. Though posterity remembers Gluck chiefly for Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck’s favorite among his operas was this one. Revivals are exceedingly rare. —Matthew Gurewitsch