Dido in England
- Lyn Richards
- Mar 19
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 20
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is widely seen as the dawn of English Baroque - and the best of British opera - at least before Britten. It was also his only opera - he wrote more than 100 songs, many anthems and music for plays. Wiki has full details of this extraordinary output of very beautiful music. There should have been more - he died at 36. Four of his six children by his wife, Frances, had died before him. It's England in the 17th century.
It's a Greek myth that came to us from a classical Roman poet, and centuries of European art. (The image above is from a painting Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the Trojan city (1815) by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.) Purcell's version of Dido and Aeneas is very English, and very much of its time. The story comes to us, as it did to Purcell's librettist, Nahum Tate, via Virgil. But Tate was writing for the English. (He was Irish - and rewarded later by becoming a poet laureate. He's the author of "While shepherds watched their flocks by night").
It's a turbulent time in England, usually termed "Restoration". (The monarchy was restored in 1660, as was highly libertine court life under Charles II (1660–85), then turbulence under Catholic James II (1685–88). Protestant William and Mary succeeded James in the year it's thought Dido and Aeneas premiered - 1688, laying a sober, pious setting for the Glorious Revolution (and inspiring many of Purcell's most famous anthems). You can live Restoration England and the musical life of Purcell, through the eyes of English intellectuals who grew up 300 years later, in Tony Palmer's 1995 film, England my England. It's in full on YouTube here.
So how did this shape our opera? "Little enough of Virgil remains... Dido is drastically simplified, and Aeneas is made into a complete booby; the sense of cosmic forces at play is replaced by the machinations of an outrageous set of Restoration witches." Read more here.
Decoding Dido
If you haven't read Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, but meet Dido only through Tate's libretto, you can be forgiven for finding her a caricature of the weak, vulnerable, hysterical female image women fought against for the next centuries. And you can be forgiven for wondering if a stronger Dido in the libretto would have make Purcell's opera more wonderful.
A lot of scholarship has focused on the remaking of the Dido myth - you can read a summary in Wiki here, or a feminist account comparing Dido and Medea, here.
There is a tendency is classical scholarship and in popular perception to read Dido as – to put it bluntly – whiny and irrational. In a way, Dido represents the ultimate foil to the Roman idea of virtuous masculinity and order: the dangerous, sexual, irrational feminine. But to see Dido as purely this is not in line with Virgil’s portrayal of her at all. More here for those interested...
There's a message in that first line of the Aeneid, "I sing of arms and the man..." If you want to read the poem in full, it's here.
Thus dies Dido, in our mythology too, powerless victim of the gods, as depicted by Henry Fusili in 1781. And the haircut? Goddess Juno, who rigged the whole thing, has sent her messenger for a lock of the defeated queen's hair.
For the English audience, Tate's simpler story deleted four bases of Virgil's story.
Dido (Elissa) in myth and possibly history was a formidable queen, strong, independent after her husband's murder, defiantly escaping her kingly brother to sail with followers to Africa.
There she founded Carthage, a successful city state, defying demands that she marry a local king and (like Penelope in the Odyssey) insisting on her fidelity to her late husband and resisting suitors.
Her downfall was not an irresistible adoration for the Trojan visitor. Rather she was a victim of the gods, by whom she was tricked into falling, powerless, in love with Aeneas - to ensure he would be welcome in Carthage. (Those gods - not witches -were always rigging things for the hero! ) More here.
Her death in Virgil's account is not a tantrum at his sailing off, but a decision about saving Carthage. In the Aeneid her words are, "I have lived and completed the course that Fortune gave, and now my image will descend in grandeur beneath the earth; I founded a splendid city, I have seen walls of my own, as an avenger of my husband I have punished my enemy brother; happy, alas, too happy, if only the Dardanian ships had never touched our shores."
"Even as Virgil tells it, there is no narrative need for Dido to fall in love with Aeneas. Jupiter has sent Mercury ahead to make the Carthaginians well disposed to and ready to host the Trojans, Dido foremost among them (1.297–304). Perhaps Venus is unaware of this, but her sending Cupid to take the form and place of Ascanius and to kindle Dido’s passion becomes literal overkill." Read it all...
Dido the Opera
In Tate's hands, the opera's plot is pretty simple, since so much of the story is deleted, as is much of the timeframe (in the Aeneid, the lovers spend months 'wedded' in a cave, but Tate allows them only a one night stand.) He complicates the plot and the disempowerment of Dido by substituting for the gods a sorcerer and witches (popular in Reformation England, as were witch hunts).
There's a superb summary and discussion here from BBC by Stephen Johnson with superb conductor Nicholas Kraemer and splendid soloists singing the great arias. Well worth 42 minutes of your time.
Musically, this is also a very English version of what was happening in Europe. How different from the racy plots and music that Cavalli created for the newly public opera houses! Purcell is presenting (like Monteverdi before, and Lully in France) to the aristocracy in court performances of masques and anthems. "Dido and Aeneas, is certainly informed by his Italian predecessors, but also by the unique aspects of French Baroque operatic style, which begat the overture, prologue, tragedie lyrique, and the inclusion of the divertissement with its dances and ballet, exemplified in the works of Lully, Charpentier and Rameau. It was Purcell’s greatest legacy in taking this musical heritage and skillfully creating a unique English operatic tradition, emblematic of the Restoration period in which he lived. Purcell's genius lay in transforming the spoken word into a musical line with extreme concision, distilling the meaning of complex human emotions into a few intensely powerful measures of vocal music." More here.
But only one song from this opera is widely known now. Dido's final Lament is one of the greatest Baroque solos for mezzos and sopranos, or more recently countertenors. "Purcell’s composition has become the UK’s favourite aria. Played annually at the Cenotaph, the haunting tune has been widely performed and recorded." More here.
Google the Lament and you'll find dozens of performances by brilliant singers. Click here for Joyce DiDonato's voice with a gallery of wonderful Dido paintings. But you may not find my favourite clip, Emma Kirkby's voice to a simple Baroque accompaniment.
Our productions
How to produce this work in our times? We will play the whole opera, but move between 2 very different productions for comparison. Interestingly, neither is British.
One of these productions we've seen before, a controversial one directed by Vincent Dumestre for L’Opéra Harmonique at Rouen, elaborately placing the action in and around the ocean.
Vivica Genaux (Alaskan soprano) is Dido; Henk Neven (baritone) is Aeneas (right).
How different is this other production! In 2023, Den Ny Opera created for their Summer Festival in Esbjerg, Denmark, a radical production of Dido and Aeneas.
Director Erlend Samnøen had a record from straight theatre, dance, musical as well as opera and singers were 'handpicked', mainly from the UK.
Mary Bevan, Dido, is described as 'one of the brightest lights to have emerged on the British opera scene in recent years'.
The band, Barokksolistene, is in the action, moving beside the singers, playing without scores, 'through their physical presence pivotal to the whole story'.
As is light - brilliant lighting and shadows.
Lyn, 20 March
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