Dido and Aeneas

Composer: PURCELL, Henry
  • The first recorded performance of Dido and Aeneas was in 1689 at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls in Chelsea. It is possible it was also performed at court at an earlier date.1
    • Josias Priest was a dancer and choreographer, which explains his interest in arts education and the production of this work with its singing, dancing and acting requirements.2
  • Though we think of Dido and Aeneas as an opera, it is actually a masque, an English drama style consisting of dialogue, song and dance, which was usually intended for domestic use, not public performances.
    • Dido and Aeneas is unusual among masques in that it is all sung, but that is not unprecedented: John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1682) is an all-sung masque that was probably a model for this work.3
    • In fact, Blow’s Venus and Adonis had also been presented at Josias Priest’s school. In that opera as well as Dido and Aeneas, the male parts were transposed up an octave so all parts could be played by girls. 
    • All-sung opera was not popular in London during Purcell’s lifetime. Attempts had been made to present Italian or French opera in England, but the public were more interested in genres that allowed both song and spoken dialogue.
  • “When I Am Laid in Earth,” Dido’s aria in which she embraces death after being abandoned by Aeneas, is built on a repeated descending tetrachord. This construction was a common symbol of death or lament in the Italian musical tradition (especially when the descending line is chromatic, as in this aria.)4

Sources

  1. Peter Holman and Robert Thompson, “Purcell, Henry (ii),” Grove Music Online, accessed December 26, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278249.
  2. Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas,” Grove Music Online (2002), accessed December 26, 2019,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000006883. 
  3. Ibid.
  4. J. Peter Burkholder et al, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 374.

Cut IDs

21109, 23041