Every November, in Whitehall, a crowd of thousands falls quiet in front of the Cenotaph. The King is there, and the prime minister, and rows of veterans in berets and medals. Before Big Ben strikes eleven, the massed bands of the armed forces play a short programme of slow music. One piece is an arrangement of a song written for a schoolgirl production in Chelsea in 1689, in which a Carthaginian queen asks to be remembered.
That is a long way to travel for a four-minute aria. But “When I am laid in earth” has never really stopped travelling. It has been sung by Kirsten Flagstad and Jessye Norman, played by brass bands and jazz groups, arranged for string quartet and synthesiser. It may be the single most performed piece of English music written before 1700. It earns that place in the first few seconds, before Dido has sung a note.
The words
Nahum Tate’s text is short enough to memorise, and it is now in the public domain. First comes the recitative, as Dido takes her sister’s hand:
Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me, On thy bosom let me rest, More I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.
Then the aria itself:
When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
And that is all. Two sentences, repeated. It is the music that does the remembering.
The bass that keeps falling
Underneath everything is a ground bass, a five-bar phrase repeated again and again from start to finish. It starts on G and slides down by semitones, G, F sharp, F, E, E flat, D, before turning back to the home note through a little cadence. Composers had used that falling chromatic line as a symbol of grief since the early 1600s; musicologists even call it the “lament bass.” Purcell’s twist is the extra bar. Five is an awkward length. Dido’s phrases never quite line up with the bass, so voice and ground keep catching against each other, overlapping and pulling apart, and the music never settles.
Above it, the vocal line does almost nothing showy. It sighs. On “Remember me” it climbs to the highest note of the aria and then repeats it, the same high G, as if Dido is straining for something she cannot quite reach. Then the line falls away. When she stops singing, the strings carry on alone for a final round of the ground, still sighing downward, which is the closest music gets to showing someone walk off into the dark.
What it means
Read the words carefully and they are less self-pitying than they sound. Dido does not ask Belinda to avenge her, or to hate Aeneas. She asks that her “wrongs,” the injuries done to her, cause her sister no trouble. Remember me, she says, but forget my fate. She wants to be remembered as a person, not as a story about a woman who was used and left. Three centuries of Cenotaph crowds have heard something similar in it: remember those who died, not only the way they died.
Hearing it
The Lament is about four minutes long and usually sung by a soprano or mezzo. Older recordings tend to be slower and grander. Janet Baker’s 1961 version with Anthony Lewis is still the touchstone for many listeners. Period-instrument performances, such as Emma Kirkby’s with Andrew Parrott, are lighter and quicker, and arguably closer to what the Chelsea audience heard. Our recordings guide has more.
Whichever you choose, listen to the whole final scene, from “Thy hand, Belinda” through the closing chorus, With drooping wings. The Lament is the peak, but the silence Purcell leaves around it is part of the music too.