Some years ago, I was assured (no doubt erroneously) that Dido's lament was de rigueur at weddings.

I saw the title to this thread and thought it was Dido, Life to Rent!  But it seems it's Purcell.  Oh, I do love that 'Snakes dripping from her hair'  Not teribly au fait with Purcell is that from Indian Queen?

Sounds to me as though it's from Music for a While. (Till the snakes drop from her head, and the whip from out her hands.) Which in turn is from Oedipus, apparently.

  No alas, that would have been entertaining!  No, he's in a purpley-blue kimono jacket, wide trousers and turban, carrying a towering bird-beaked wire-headed mirror-eyed evil-looking head on a tall stick, a large gnarled claw hand on another stick, all joined by lots of grey-white streamers swirling about.

Richard - I guessed what you really meant about Dido going by too quickly.  It is perfectly formed, but definitely leaves one wanting more and regretting the brevity of Purcell's life.  One does wonder how music in this country - and beyond - may have evolved had he lived and written longer.

Ooh, I'm going to be sad it'll be over tomorrow night.  There's some vague talk of reviving it next year, but who knows...

All of which makes me painfully aware how pitifully little I know of Purcell's more serious music. (And then there's jazz... What have I been doing all this time?)

Aha, silly me, I actually have a copy of that Laurie/Dart score.  I will go retrieve it from where I hurled it across the room upon discovering they annotated loads of overdotting.

That score has been thoroughly superceded (among players, anyway) by the one from King's Music.  The older one was no doubt revolutionary in its time, in bringing much research into how the music would have been played in its day into the reach of players who wouldn't have had any idea.  But opinions about things like overdotting - and the level of knowledge you can expect players to bring to the piece - have changed since then.  The King's score is much cleaner and doesn't alter any of the rhythms or "correct" any of the notes from what Purcell wrote.

But it would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  I'll have another look at the additional materials.

It's an interesting idea to bring issues of race into the opera.  Again, it would be useful to know more about how the myth evolved, what elements of the myth would have been common knowledge to people in Purcell and Tate's day, how they would have viewed these characters.

From a modern perspective, quite a lot is known about who these people were and where they were from.  Dido is not actually from Carthage - she founded the city after fleeing Tyre (in modern Lebanon, just south of Beirut), where the king (her father) had left the throne jointly to her and her brother.  (Some sources say the king left the throne entirely to her - either way, her brother forced her out.)  Aeneas, being from Troy, was (at current best guess) from an area on the western edge of modern Turkey.  And because they all lived well before the Arab invasions of North Africa and the Mediterranean rim, everyone would have "looked" quite different from what we might expect now.

But this level of research into the ancient myths - actually treating these characters as real historical figures - didn't happen until the 19th century I believe?  And from Purcell's, Tate's and their audience's point of view, "fate" may have had much to do with racial (and gender-based - Aeneas had a "choice" of going off to found Rome, or staying in Carthage as a queen's consort) issues.  But the one thing I think everyone would have known is that Dido is not from Carthage - she and her considerable following pitched up in North Africa and grabbed a bit of land from the local inhabitants through the clever use of this - and they say girls can't do math!   

I may also have got the wrong end of the stick, and I'm relying on memory from having read that accompanying commentary several years ago - I'm staying in London at the moment and not near to my own copy.  However, I seemed to remember that this was newly-found material which is linked to being for D&A by some rather scribbled notes found on it.  Even so, as GG correctly points out, the libretto clearly mentions other material for the opera which is no longer in the "trad" version of the piece...  suggesting that the tersely-argued drama that runs for an hour or so is not what Purcell had in mind for the piece?   I wonder if "the opera we have now" is what the young girls of rhe school performed - with the additional material that "frames" it being performed by pros Purcell had brought along to bump up the performance?   That's purely conjecture on my part, of course