"Ah, Belinda, I am press'd with torment" — the queen confides her secret misery to her lady-in-waiting (1689)
The opening aria, already a lament over a ground bass, long before the famous one
Opera · Opera in English
Dido and Aeneas
1689, Josias Priest's boarding school for girls, Chelsea, London
Henry Purcell · libretto by Nahum Tate, after Virgil
Purcell's only true opera, and the earliest English opera still in the repertory, compresses Book IV of the Aeneid into an hour: a Carthaginian queen is courted by a shipwrecked Trojan prince, tricked into losing him by a coven of witches, and dies of grief. It ends with a lament over a chromatic descending ground bass that is probably the most famous piece of English Baroque vocal music.
How to spot them
- ▸Carthage after the fall of Troy; an hour long, in three acts, with a chorus that comments like a Greek one
- ▸A Sorceress and her witches replace Virgil's gods as the engine of the tragedy
- ▸A false Mercury, sent by the witches, orders the hero back to sea
- ▸A queen (mezzo-soprano or soprano), her confidante Belinda, and a rare tenor chorus of sailors
- ▸The closing lament is built on a five-bar chromatic descending ground bass, repeated eleven times
Arias & moments — listen
"Wayward sisters, you that fright the lonely traveller" — a sorceress summons her coven to destroy a queen (1689)
The Act 2 cave scene, the opera's invented villainy — there is no Sorceress in Virgil
"In our deep vaulted cell" — a witches' chorus in which the cave answers every phrase back (1689)
The Echo Chorus, followed by an echo dance for the furies
"Thanks to these lonesome vales" — a royal hunting party is broken up by a conjured storm (1689)
The grove scene; the witches' storm drives the lovers apart and the chorus sings 'Haste, haste to town'
"Come away, fellow sailors" — a drunken chorus of seamen take their leave of the nymphs on the shore (1689)
Opens Act 3; the sailors cheerfully advise 'never intending to visit them more'
"When I am laid in earth" — a queen's dying lament over a chromatic ground bass, ending 'Remember me' (1689)
The ground bass falls chromatically through a fourth and repeats eleven times beneath the voice
Recording: Музика - Г. Перселл, переклад - Олена О'Лір · CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
"With drooping wings ye Cupids come" — a final chorus scattering roses on a tomb (1689)
The closing chorus, with falling scales on the word 'drooping'
Quick-fire facts
- •The libretto is by Nahum Tate, later Poet Laureate, adapting his own earlier play Brutus of Alba; the source is Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid.
- •The first documented performance was at Josias Priest's boarding school for girls in Chelsea in 1689, though many scholars argue for an earlier court performance.
- •No score survives from Purcell's lifetime; the earliest manuscript, the Tenbury score, dates from around a century later.
- •Tate's prologue and the music for it are lost, as is a dance at the end of Act 2, so the act ends abruptly in the surviving music.
- •The final lament is sung each year at the Cenotaph service of remembrance in an orchestral arrangement.
- •Purcell wrote no other through-composed opera; his other stage works, such as King Arthur, The Fairy-Queen and Dioclesian, are semi-operas with spoken dialogue.
- •Virgil's Dido is destroyed by the will of the gods; Tate replaces them with a Sorceress and witches, a change usually read as a nod to English masque tradition.
- •Famous exponents of the title role include Kirsten Flagstad, Janet Baker and Jessye Norman.
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Dido and Aeneas: opera by Purcell
- Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online) — Purcell, Henry: Dido and Aeneas
- Curtis Price — Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)