Come and see Lully's famous opera ‘Rolland’ at the Royal Opera House.
A mature work for Lully and Quinault, Roland is part of a ‘trilogy’ of epic-inspired operas, a departure from lyrical tragedies with mythological themes. It comes between Amadis, based on the Spanish chivalric novel Amadis of Gaul by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (which Cervantes parodies in Don Quixote), and Armide, inspired by Jerusalem Delivered, the sublime epic – romantic before its time – by Tasso. Roland focuses on a famous episode from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which a knight literally goes mad with love for the beauty who betrayed him.
