Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyze the rewriting of Dido’s myth by Giovan Battista Busenello, the librettist of the first opera named after the queen of Carthage. The imposing regality of Dido and the highly dramatic tension of the Aeneid are absent in Busenello’s libretto. Interestingly, if in the fourth book of the Virgilian poem Dido kills herself with Aeneas’ sword, in the final act of the opera she marries Iarbas, king of Gaetulians. Poignantly, in her only aria Dido sings her rejection of Iarbas’ advances, instead of her death wish or her sorrow for Aeneas’ departure. The tragic éthos we expect of Dido surfaces in two other characters in the opera, Hecuba and Cassandra, specifically through their laments. The basso lines of their laments call to mind the formal archetype at the heart of the famous Dido’s lament, Dido’s aria in Dido and Eneas, composed by Henry Purcell forty-eight years after the Didone. In that way, Hecuba and Cassandra constitute the actual tragic characters in the Didone, while, conversely, Dido is granted a happy ending, a deviation from the source just as peculiar as its author.
Highlights
The tragic éthos we expect of Dido surfaces in two other characters in the opera, Hecuba and Cassandra, through their laments
Dido appears for the first time on the Italian and European opera scene in the homonymous melodrama, with music by Francesco Cavalli and libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello; the Didone was premiered at the San Cassiano Theater in Venice in 1641.1
Until 1637, when the first public theater was opened in Venice, operas were mainly performed in courtly or academic feasts, or they could take place in patrician manors: opera was characterized by exceptionality and unrepeatability
Summary
Dido appears for the first time on the Italian and European opera scene in the homonymous melodrama, with music by Francesco Cavalli and libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello; the Didone was premiered at the San Cassiano Theater in Venice in 1641.1. As a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, and oblivious to any dogmatic restriction, Busenello does not merely bring to the scene an extensive and complex epic story in the form of opera in three acts, but transforms Dido’s Virgilian tragedy into a true happy ending tragicomedy, crowned by a marriage so different from ancient tales to be still astonishing today.8 Even if both Virgil and Busenello largely change the story, the librettist intervenes on the Virgilian version in a invasive way, because until that time Dido’s tale used to have a tragic epilogue, the point of convergence of the two variants of the myth. In only three cases the model is been modified and totally changed: in Act 1, scene 3 Coroebus throws himself against Pyrrhus in order to protect Cassandra and is killed by him, while in the Aeneid he dies in battle with many other soldiers, killed by Peneleos (Aen. 2, 424-5); in Act 1, scene 6, Creusa intentionally leaves her husband and her son to come back home, because she wanted to take some jewels; the last modification is, the happy ending and the final wedding
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