Gosh! Best to get it over with when young anyway.

I hate to admit owning the Jessye Norman/Raymond Leppard recording of Dido and Aeneas but the Sailor there, Patrick Power, does it with 'an accent' though goodness knows what accent it is supposed to be. Doesn't sound West Country. More Hull?

IIRC Philip Langridge of all people (Et tu, Philip?!) did it with a bit of a West Country burr in a Proms performance years ago. That was conducted by Raymond Leppard too. Maybe it's a Leppardy thing?

Just dug out the Kirsten Flagstad 'Mermaid Theatre' recording as well. Since this was produced by Bernard Miles you might expect broadest Zummerzzet. But no, pure bone china 'Vicar Choral' (but possibly sung from a hammock rather than a bunk).   

Thanks, Richard, for putting very clearly what's been bothering me.  Being interested in "authentic" performance has made me wonder about this very point.  But it's also made me wonder how far "authenticity" ought to go.  If it reaches the point where we're throwing up barriers between us and the audience in order to demonstrate how capable we are of overcoming them, isn't that getting a bit silly?  But if it can work, don't we have a responsibility to try it?  I don't know.  I'd be interested to hear some performances of earlier music that take these issues into account - can you recommend any recordings?

There are some things that can never be "recreated" - boy's voices, for example.  Puberty and its attendant voice-drop happened so much later in those days than it does now, and children were expected to become adults so much more quickly, it was quite plausible for a 16-17 year old male treble to sing with physical control and emotional maturity today's 11-12 year olds couldn't handle.

And there are some things that shouldn't be "recreated" which nonetheless may have had an effect on music-making - trying to play while itching with lice, trying to read badly printed music by candlelight, trying to breathe properly when one's neighbour hasn't washed in months etc.

Well, there is an argument by which the use of a rustic accent might be valuable not so much because of its cultural meanings relative to whatever was perceived as a received norm of the time, but simply because of the sonic qualities of that language, and how they might relate to the music? I think this type of thinking has informed some performances of earlier music taking on board what is known about regional variations in Latin pronunciation.

Aha, all this talk of piraty sailors in Dido vaguely reminded me of something... So I reborrowed the recording I once listened to from the library today, and indeed...

Come away, fellow sailors

I think this was one of the main things that put me off this recording, hence my request for others recordings...  Still, this one had the alluring bonus of Lorraine Hunt as Dido...

(More details:
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra
Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
Nicholas McGegan
Harmonia Mundi)

Oh yes, it has the shrieky witches as well... 

But ere we this perform

I suppose Tate's unaccomplished dramaturgy intended to invoke pathos by making invidious comparisons between the lecherous behaviour of the crew and the agonising tragedy of its captain - summoned by Fate (and, ehem, Fas in Virgil) to sire the scions of Rome, ie and not those who would become Rome's bitterest enemies in Cato's time.  On that basis it's very likely that he did intend the crew to be contrasted with pius Aeneas, probably by accent as well as behaviour.  But it's not supposed to be laughable, which unfortunately happens in the clip above (presumably sung by our old friend Master Bates?).   This isn't rocket science and actors in the straight theatre deal with it every day - if we can make Billy Budd a credible crewman, we can do the same with the Sailor in D&A.  I fear there's something rather true in Strina's comments about the efforts to which the HIP brigade sometimes go to throw down the gauntlet, and this clip is a huge lapse of judgement in an another promising recording.

It needs to be pointed out, though, that the libretto for Billy Budd uses very different vocabulary for the crew and lower ranks, and that there's more time to establish their otherness. It might be argued, too, that since characters singing is already an unrealistic convention in itself, then the need to move back to realism by adopting accents is questionable. But occasionally the accent is written in - doesn't 'Mariandel' adopt a local dialect? - and sometimes performing tradition interposes: I've never yet seen or heard a performance of Britten's MND which doesn't use some version of accent for at least some of the Mechanicals, if not all of them.

Exactly what sounds were to be heard in accents before they could be physically recorded will always remain at least in part a matter for conjecture, but it's worth considering that the very 'cut-glass' British accent with its exaggeratedly clipped vowel sounds - sometimes referred to as an 'Oxford' accent - may very well be a product of the Hanoverian succession, with the court and gentry influenced by the sounds made by Germans when they speak English, and that the language as spoken in Shakespeare's time was probably more closely related to the accents of New rather than Old England nowadays.

I'm surprised to see the suggestion that Southampton should be linked to London in contrast to a West-Country accent: I've mentioned before that it's only really with the arrival of radio and TV that accents have become dominated by the metropolitan sounds: even in my childhood, rural Berkshire and Hampshire accents sounded far more like West-Country than they tend to today, and even though the Reading accent sounds increasingly like a London accent it wasn't always so: Ricky Gervais's accent, as heard as David Brent in The Office, is a mild but accurate version of how the accent sounded in the 50s and 60s: this in a town barely forty miles from London. The major problem is that everyone thinks they know what a West-Country accent sounds like - "Mummerset" - when in fact there are hundreds of them, all with different sounds, but it's nearly always that one which actors and singers dredge up automatically. It used to be very much the same with American accents, but work on these is increasingly put into the hands of a dialect coach for stage as well as screen. Perhaps one should be engaged for the next recording of D & A (the opera, that is, not the opticians).

Of course with all this talk of various ports in 17th century England it's important to remember that, dramatically speaking, the relevant port in D&A is not London or Portsmouth or Plymouth etc but Troy by way of Carthage.  I think the issue with accents is that at some point someone decided that any generic sailor ought to sound like a piratical exaggerated "mummerset" (what a good word) stereotype.  Presumably this happened well after Purcell's time, as "sailor" in his day would not have suggested a particular accent, seeing as there were so many major ports - with a wide variety of accents - in his day.  Would the sailor have had a particular accent in performances in the late 17th century?  If so, which one?  And what would it actually have sounded like?

As for witchy cackles - did anyone associate shrieky cackles with witches before the release of The Wizard of Oz?  Where on earth did that come from?  Would Purcell have associated witches with cackling?  Somehow I doubt it.

Reiner, RULE TWO makes sense and is all well and good - but what's RULE ONE?

Arr, ye scurvy dogs, arrrgh, jim-lad, methinks me hearties tis neerly toime fer the good-night thread, arrrr.

Don't talk about fight club?