The most important opera in the English language had its first known performance in a girls’ school. The title page of the libretto, printed in 1689, is quite clear about it: “An Opera Perform’d at Mr. Josias Priest’s Boarding-School at Chelsey. By Young Gentlewomen.” Priest was a professional dancing master who had worked in the London theatres; the school, in a big house by the Thames, taught the daughters of the well-off to dance, sing and behave. The epilogue was written by the comic poet Thomas D’Urfey and spoken by one of the pupils, Lady Dorothy Burk.
Whether the opera was written for those girls, or was a court piece they borrowed, is one of the great unsolved cases of musicology. Some scholars think it was composed earlier in the decade for Charles II or James II; some think the Chelsea show was its premiere. What nobody disputes is the result. In under an hour, with a small string band and a handful of singers, Purcell produced a tragedy as tight as anything on the London stage, and an ending that people still cannot sit through dry-eyed.
The story, act by act
Nahum Tate, the librettist, was not a great poet. (He is better remembered for rewriting King Lear with a happy ending.) But he knew how to cut. He took the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, threw out the gods, and replaced them with witches, a very English sort of villain.
Act I: The palace
Carthage. Queen Dido is sunk in a melancholy she cannot name. Her sister and confidante Belinda urges her to “shake the cloud from off your brow” and stop resisting what the whole court can see: she is in love with their guest, the Trojan prince Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy. Dido sings Ah! Belinda, I am prest with torment over a repeating bass line, the first of the opera’s great ground basses. Aeneas arrives, pleads his case, and Dido gives way. The court celebrates with a chorus and a triumphant dance.
Act II: The cave and the grove
In a cave, a Sorceress gathers her witches. She hates Dido (Tate never explains why, which only makes it creepier) and plans to destroy her before sunset. Their plot: conjure a storm to break up the royal hunting party, and send a spirit disguised as Mercury to tell Aeneas that Jove commands him to leave Carthage at once. The witches cackle in echo choruses, “Ho ho ho,” that are as much comedy as menace.
In a grove, Dido, Aeneas and the court rest after the hunt. Belinda sings of the beauty of the place; a Second Woman tells the story of Actaeon, the hunter torn apart by his own hounds, a not-so-subtle omen. The storm breaks, and the party scatters. Aeneas is left alone with the false Mercury, who delivers his orders. Aeneas agrees, in agony, to sail that night.
Act III: The harbour and the palace
The Trojan sailors prepare their ships with a rollicking chorus, Come away, fellow sailors, about loving and leaving women on shore. The witches gloat. Then the final scene: Dido confronts Aeneas. He offers to defy the gods and stay. She tells him that the mere fact he thought of leaving is enough, and sends him away. Alone with Belinda, she sings her lament, “When I am laid in earth,” and dies. Cupids are called to scatter roses on her tomb in the hushed final chorus, With drooping wings.
The characters
| Role | Voice | Who they are |
|---|---|---|
| Dido | Soprano or mezzo-soprano | Queen of Carthage |
| Aeneas | Tenor or baritone | Trojan prince |
| Belinda | Soprano | Dido’s sister and confidante |
| Second Woman | Soprano | A lady of the court |
| Sorceress | Mezzo-soprano (sometimes bass) | Dido’s enemy |
| First and Second Witch | Sopranos or mezzos | Her accomplices |
| Spirit | Soprano or countertenor | Disguised as Mercury |
| Sailor | Tenor | A Trojan sailor |
Aeneas, notoriously, gets almost nothing to sing. He has no aria at all, only recitative. Generations of baritones have found this unfair. Generations of audiences have decided it serves him right.
Why it works
The secret is compression. Purcell has no time for the long, florid arias of Italian opera. Scenes turn in a few bars. The witches go from laughter to menace inside a single chorus. And he binds the whole thing together with the ground bass, a short bass line repeated over and over while the voice moves freely above it. It is a device that sounds like fate: the bass goes round, and nobody can get off the wheel.
The other secret is English. Purcell set his language with a precision nobody had managed before, and few since. Every stress falls where an English speaker would put it. The recitatives sound like heightened speech, which is exactly what they are.
The missing pieces
For all its fame, Dido survives in fragments. Purcell’s autograph is lost. The oldest complete score was copied decades after his death and lacks the prologue printed in the 1689 libretto, as well as music for a scene at the end of Act II. Performers fill the gaps by borrowing other Purcell dances, writing new music or, most often, just cutting. It is a strange fate for the cornerstone of English opera, and it hasn’t slowed it down at all.
Where to start
Listen to the Lament first. Then go back and hear the whole hour in one sitting, ideally in one of the recordings on our recordings guide. It is one of the few operas you can get through on a lunch break, and one of the few that might ruin your afternoon.