Erwin und Elmire is an opera in two acts by Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, with a libretto by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after Oliver Goldsmith's ballad of Angelica and Edwin, The Hermit, in his sentimental novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

Goethe's arrival in Weimar coincided with her partial withdrawal from political life as her son had reached the age of maturity, and Anna seized the opportunity to provide her own setting of Erwin and Elmire for the Court Theatre, where it was first performed on 24 May 1776.

Goethe made his adaptation of Erwin und Elmire, as the ballad became known in Germany, in 1773, attracted, no doubt, to the parallels between the tale and his faltering relationship with Lili Schönemann, to whom the text is dedicated.

The great success of Goethe's reworking of this sentimental tale no doubt derives in large measure from the fact that it touched upon many social and cultural preoccupations of the day.

The literary-poetic figures of the 'hermit' and the 'hut' were in fact to become recurring themes in Goethe's writings, also helping to frame his lifelong exploration of the difficulty of reconciling steadfast virtues with restless desires.

The dramatic effectiveness of these stylistic adaptations marks Anna Amalia's Erwin und Elmire as a major early achievement in the development of German opera.

After Olympia departs, we discover that Elmire is distressed because she believes her cold behaviour towards Erwin, her lowly born suitor, has caused him to disappear.

After Anna Amalia's, several more settings were to follow, including ones by Carl David Stegmann (Hamburg, 1776), Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (Weimar, 1785) and Karl Christian Agthe (Ballenstedt, 1785).

The story eventually became the subject of satire: in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Trial by Jury (1875), the two lovers (here Edwin and Angelina) become the principal parties to a divorce case.