Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Attending a performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in a Sydney girls’ school, I remember thinking it a strangely sexless affair, for a tale of such tragic passion. Perhaps the producer was right to present it that way – after all, the first known performance of Dido and Aeneas was as ‘An opera perform’d at Mr. Josias Priest’s Boarding-school at Chelsea by young Gentlewomen’. Actually, such schools in Restoration England may have been less sheltered than they pretended to be (like today’s?). All the same, appearances had to be kept up, and about as close as Purcell’s opera comes to frankness is Dido’s ‘torment not to be confess’d’, and Aeneas’s retrospective ‘one night enjoy’d, the next forsook’. These are hardly to be compared with the story’s source in Virgil, where ‘love-sick’ Dido is a woman ‘wild with passion’, ‘in a rage of desire’, whose modesty is being broken down, and who in the cave to which the lovers are driven by a storm
‘recked nothing for appearance or reputation:
The love she brooded on now was a secret love no longer;
Marriage, she called it, drawing the word to veil her sin.’
(C. Day Lewis’ translation).
The consummation of Dido and Aeneas’s love is not explicit in Nahum Tate’s libretto for Purcell’s opera, and the manner of Dido’s death is also unspecified (in Virgil she takes her own life by falling on a sword, on the funeral pyre she has built for herself). But the essentials of the story are there, and Dido at least is a grand tragic figure. So, it is unfair to say, as one commentator has done, that ‘Dido is more than half a schoolgirl herself, with a crowd of schoolgirls around her’. We may be grateful that this opera was performed in a school, Edward Dent has suggested, since schools had kept going the pre-Restoration tradition of musically elaborate masques: ‘It was only in a school that so novel a work of art as Dido and Aeneas could have been attempted’. Thus, to cull some more quotes from the literature, Purcell’s ‘freak opera’ came about ‘almost by accident’, as ‘a chamber opera for amateurs’.
These views of Dido and Aeneas are usually presented as part of a lament – that Purcell’s opera had no successors in England until the 20th century. Indeed, so the usual story goes, the composer seemed not to realise what he had done: that he had created the first dramatic work in English by an English composer – one that, being fully sung, could be called ‘opera’. The work, after a few revivals early in the 18th century, actually disappeared, and a copy of Purcell’s performing score only became known again in the late 19th century. Ever since then – and this after all is what is important – Purcell’s little opera has proved effective whenever it is staged, and has impressed by its concentration, directness, its swift and vivid presentation of the drama. Far from being a historical curiosity, it is still for many the greatest English opera.
Could such a work have been created for a girls’ school? All the solo parts are allocated to female voices, with the exception of Aeneas. The light scoring is also suited to a school’s resources, and the inclusion of several dance numbers fits with a school directed by a dancing master, Josias Priest. But there are grounds for thinking the first performance may have been earlier than the first known one, which was in 1689, sometime before December. The style of much of Purcell’s music for Dido fits better with what he was writing in 1683-85. Even the supposed allusions to the monarchs William and Mary, in the text’s Prologue (of which Purcell’s setting, if he made one, has not survived), usually taken as reinforcing a date after the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, seem odd appearing in the preface to an opera about a prince deserting a queen with tragic consequences.
In 1988 a libretto was discovered of John Blow’s masque Venus and Adonis, printed not for the original performance at court, but for a revival at Priest’s Chelsea school in 1684. Scholars began posing the question ‘If Venus and Adonis had been first produced as a court masque and then revived as an end-of-term school show, might not the same have happened with Dido?’ The earliest surviving score of Dido and Aeneas, seems to contradict the statement that it was ‘perform’d by young gentlewomen’, as it contains parts for a baritone Aeneas, and countertenor, tenor and bass chorus parts. Even the libretto of the Chelsea school production has elaborate directions for stage machinery, beyond the possibilities in a school. The parallels between Purcell’s Dido and Blow’s Venus and Adonis had long been noticed: the three-act structure, the use of dance to ‘articulate’ the story, the chorus playing several different roles (courtiers, huntsmen, cupids, witches, sailors). There is even a direct allusion where Aeneas displays a boar’s head impaled on his spear, since Adonis was killed by a boar.
Although usually called a masque, Venus and Adonis is really as much an opera as Dido and Aeneas, and Blow, who was Purcell’s teacher, petitioned King Charles II in 1683, about the time he composed Venus and Adonis, for a licence to form an English Academy. This initiative may have been intended to forestall the king’s invitation to the French composer Louis Grabu to compose a full-length, all-sung opera in English. So, Purcell, this argument concludes, probably composed Dido and Aeneas in 1683-4, shortly after Blow finished Venus and Adonis. Purcell and librettist Nahum Tate envisaged a professional production in a fully-equipped theatre, with changeable scenery, flying machinery, and trapdoors.
The jury is still out, but regardless of the verdict the process illuminates Purcell’s opera. The accident that the first performance was in a school for girls does not mean that Purcell would have conceived the work differently if it had been intended for a professional theatre. Those who believe that Dido and Aeneas can be interpreted in terms of the conventions of the professional musical theatre of Purcell’s day – that the Sorceress, for example, is best sung by a man – have some strong evidence for their view. Purcell’s ambition in this piece is great, and his treatment of the subject has proved convincing for grown-ups.
What might the schoolgirls have attempted next? Perhaps not, as the producer flippantly replied to that question from a gushing ‘gentle’ parent after an end-of-term staging in another Australian school: ‘Wagner’s Ring Cycle’. But is Dido’s lament any less telling than Brünnhilde’s Immolation? It’s shorter, and it leaves time for more…
Something is needed to fill out the evening to full length, something perhaps requiring similarly modest forces. Dido (unlike the Ring!) poses few problems for staging, and audiences will recognise it as operatic, possibly even being grateful for its telling brevity.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2004