About the Piece
Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was the greatest English composer of his age, and though he died aged only 36, he was recognised and celebrated during his life as a master of sacred, dramatic, and occasional music. He left us over 700 works, whose overall quality is of a very high order, but Dido and Aeneas (likely composed c.1789) has become his most performed piece, and has captured the modern imagination as few other pieces of Baroque theatre have.
It is a remarkably compact work, the whole tragic narrative compressed by composer and librettist into the span of less than an hour. The libretto by Nahum Tate is unusually strong, the whole piece unfurling in rhyming couplets, each of which both pithily moves the plot on, and unambiguously reveals the inner lives of the characters and their attitudes towards each other. If anything, the pace can feel alarmingly fast (very rare in opera!), the action moving in the recitatives especially at a blinding pace, and requiring the singers to respond to each new line with quicksilver shifts of feeling and attitude– no generalised operatic emoting here!
Tate uses book four of the Aeneid as his starting point, which tells the entire Dido saga in a few blisteringly intense pages. The context is that Dido, queen of Carthage, has been ruling her city state alone since the death of her husband. She has forsworn remarrying, but finds herself hopelessly in love with Aeneas against her better judgement. At the opera’s opening she is tormented by her love, feelings that she thinks cannot be shared with anyone at court. Tate is an astute psychologist though, and reveals that this ‘secret passion’ which Dido thinks she is concealing so well, has in fact already been long guessed and is later encouraged by Dido’s courtiers, led by her confidante Belinda and the mysteriously unnamed Second Woman.
In the Virgil, it is the gods that intervene with this burgeoning romance, and Mercury appears as a messenger from Jupiter to tell Aeneas to leave Carthage and go to found Rome. Tate changes the source of this supernatural force of separation - he realises that in theatre, a true antagonist is required, and so he introduces the resentful Sorceress, who leads a (very 17th century English) coven of witches. Dido and the Sorceress never meet in the opera - the latter is simply a source of chaos and ruination, motivated as she says by loathing and envy of all those “in prosperous state”.
About the production
In his libretto, Tate compresses Virgil’s already taut narrative still further, and I have sought to reintroduce a few details from this source material so as to tell the story more fully. One example is Dido and Aeneas’s wedding in the grove (or cave as it is in the original). Its impromptu, unofficial nature leads to a bitter and irreconcilable disagreement as to how binding it is. Another is that nowhere in Nahun’s libretto do we see Aeneas interacting with his sailors, and nor do we get Dido’s desperate reaction to seeing the ships being prepared to leave Carthage’s harbours for Rome.
We have also been thinking a lot during our rehearsals about the fact that the story of Dido and Aeneas has been told, and retold so many times over the last three millenia. Already for Virgil, writing in the first century BC, the story of the Aeneid was more than 700 years old. Then, four centuries later, in about 350 AD, the magnificent Low Ham Mosaic (which can be seen in this very room) was created for a Roman villa situated nearby in Somerset. The mosaic depicts in several panels the whole story of Dido and Aeneas, and formed the basis of my ideas for this production - the nature of story telling, fate, and how we relate to our history and transmit stories in our culture.
In the early 14th century, Dido is depicted in Dante’s Inferno as an inhabitant of the second circle of hell, eternally buffeted by the torrid winds of desire. Later in the Renaissance she was still a figure of fascination and became the subject of a play by Christopher Marlowe, and was obviously an important figure for Shakespeare too, who refers to her no fewer than twelve times in his plays. Purcell and Tate’s opera is a very 17th century take on the story, looking back to Virgil, but with the addition of the English witches already mentioned, and the name Belinda too, very evocative of their own age, rather than that of the ancients (Virgil calls her Anna). An ideal tragic operatic heroine, there are dozens of operas in which Dido is further depicted; after Purcell most famously as a central character in Berlioz’s masterpiece The Trojans of 1860.
Then, after a period of neglect, Purcell’s opera was dusted off and resurrected in several productions in the early 20th century, and a new generation saw his incarnation of Dido. The Low Ham mosaic was uncovered in Somerset in 1938, but had to wait until the mid 1950s to be fully excavated and placed in its present location. The opera increased in prominence in the late 20th century as the historically informed performance movement made performances of Baroque opera both more frequent, and more central to the musical and cultural life in the UK and abroad. And here we are today, presenting it to you, our audience!
Somerset Opera has now existed for half a century, and I wanted to use costumes in this show selected from the dozens of previous productions in this company’s history, encompassing many different operas and historical periods that those operas were set in. In doing this, I hope it encourages us to reflect again on how we have told the story of Dido in Somerset, reaching from the present production in 2024 AD right back to the Low Ham mosaic in 350 AD.