I just want to gush about what an amazing piece Dido and Aeneas is.  Gush gush gush.  By turns achingly beautiful, exciting, sexy, terrifying, tender, raucous, heartbreaking.  Huge scope for all the extremes of human emotion - and that's just in the instrumental bits.

I'm not overly impressed by the writing of Mr. Nat [sic - he's actually Nahum, isn't he] Tate, though.  Has anyone read anything else of his?  There's something profound in the couplet "Great minds against themselves conspire/And shun the cure they most desire", but beyond that it's pretty banal - and a huge testament to Purcell's setting and music that he makes it all sound so ravishing and meaningful.

(Come to think of it, there isn't much literature from that era generally that I like.  The stuff a little earlier or a little later is fabulous, but...)

Just one gripe - has anyone here heard (live, no cheating) a completely confidently together rendition of the sorceress's scene?  It's &%@£ing difficult to get together, particularly in a staged version...

What's your opinion about the additional Masque music for D&A which has been published, Strina?  It brings the work's length to nearer 90 minutes.  It's the usual thing - the gods dispute about the conflicting bonds of love versus duty, before inviting us to observe these things in practice.  There are some masque dances (for the sailors, and others) as well.   Personally I think the work gains from having this material (re-)introduced,  but others may say it dilutes the piece?

The deceptively simple nature of the piece and its music has encouraged a great many amateur performances - I think many of us must have been in this piece in our student days somehow or other?  Of course it's marvellous that so many people have come to know the work through direct involvement, but I fear that the work's overall standing may have suffered through performances that lacked the professional approach, musical excellence and decent production budget to bring it off to the level it deserves?   I agree that the Sorceress is a hard thing to do - it invariably looks like Hattie Jacques in Carry On Screaming.  It's clearly modelled on the witches in The Scottish Play,  but the material's weaker - the assistant witches are a bit woeful.  Of course modern audiences who've seen Nightmare On Elm Street or any in that genre are going to expect a supernatural scene that few productions can deliver, and the result instead appears to be pure smoked jambon.

[And talking of duty, I am honour-bound to mention that second English opera about the Carthaginian monarch, DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE (1794) by Stephen Storace.  Allegedly his most complex and advanced piece and the only one without spoken dialogue, it was his only box-office flop, and the work bombed.  As a result no printed score was ever issued, and the entire work is now lost - we only know it from contemporary accounts of those who performed in it, and from playbills.  Storace lived exactly one hundred years later than Purcell, and died at the same age, also of pneumonia - having written an opera about Dido.]


Two mentions of Hattie Jacques in one thread, eh?

You're probably right, Reiner. I've never seen it professionally produced, but it really is extremely useful in being 'easy' enough (and short enough) for student performances. We did one at my place years ago, and it brought out the very best in the student singers, orchestra and techies, and turned quite a few of them on to opera. It's certainly a very classy piece.

No, Eru, I wasn't in that OAE production.  Funny that the one I'm doing now uses a similar idea of puppets, (although the singers themselves carry them in mine - stylised but simple and effective, I think - inspired by kabuki aesthetics) - similar ideas of Fate and how we are all but puppets in the hands of the capricious and cruel gods, perhaps?

Reiner, I'm afraid to say I don't know the published additional Masque music you mention.  Who has published it and when?  Where does the music itself come from?  Could be interesting.  Although what Richard says he doesn't like about Dido - that it goes by too quickly - is also a sort of strength.  Intensity of dramatic pacing and all that - and maybe that would be diluted with too many "extras".  I'd be curious to find out more, though.  The production I'm doing adds only two improvised guitar dances - one after "Pursue thy conquest" and the other before "Oft she visits."

This is the first time I've done a single-strings version at a high professional level, and I'm absolutely loving it.

I don't know much about how the actual story of D&A evolved.  In the myths and legends, Dido was a powerful monarch done out of her inherited throne by her scheming brother.  She had also been married before.  She went into exile with a considerable following, acquired some land in a morally dubious but intellectually brilliant coup, and founded a great city.  When Aeneas came along and then left again, she didn't merely wither away from her broken heart - she built up a funeral pyre (which included the bed they shared), cursed Aeneas and all his progeny, and fell upon his sword (don't know why he would have left that behind).  When they encountered each other in the underworld, he tried to approach her but she turned her back on him and chose to carry on walking with her first husband.  How much of this story would have been known to Purcell's audience, and how surprising would the changes (in both events and character) have been to them I wonder?

I put it on the Live Performance thread a while ago, Ruth - it's at the Temple Festival in Middle Temple Hall.  Only three shows, the first one was Wednesday, one tonight, one tomorrow.  Early start, 6:30pm.  There are a few tickets left, but I think the cheaper ones are gone - http://www.templemusic.org/

With your schedule, Ruth, I'm not surprised you can't slip in a spontaneous Dido!  But I hope you enjoy the other two - let us know (I'm especially curious about Poppea).

Right, I'd better be off.  More anon.

<bait being risen to emoticon>

I'm a big, big fan of Les Troyens - as well as being full of glorious music it seems to me to have a sweep and grandeur and sheer scale of ambition which, in a good performance, puts it in a simlar league to works like Don Carlos. 

For me, it is a work in which Berlioz finally comes to terms with his lifetime's obsession with Gluck as much as his devotion to Virgil; it is the passages where the influence of Gluck is strongest that seem to me to make the biggest impression - I'm thinking of the extraordinary pantomime in the first act, where the solo clarinet expresses Andromache's grief, or the last scene of the fourth act, from the passage where Dido, on hearing how Andromache has remarried, drops her misgivings about her relationship with Aeneas, through to that extraordinary love duet. 

It is, IMO, a completely different work to Purcell's Dido, with an aesthetic so different that it almost seems odd to be drawing the comparison.  I wouldn't be without either.

Thank you.