Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas Bruce Wood

Abstract

Bruce Wood’s edition of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, published as volume 3 in The Works of Henry Purcell, replaces the earlier Purcell Society edition of Margaret Laurie (London, 1979), which itself replaced the original edition by W. H. Cummings (London, 1889). Wood’s edition is the first to appear since my own, with Edward J. Dent, for Oxford University Press and Eulenberg (London and Mainz, 1987). The timing seems to be propitious: Robert Shay’s new edition of the opera was recently released by Bärenreiter (2023). The past thirty-five years have witnessed significant alterations in terms of what is known (and unknown) about Dido. New evidence has come to the fore, and, in addition, a series of articles from 1992 by Wood and Andrew Pinnock, often as co-authors, reinterpreted many of the issues raised by Dido, prompting significant responses from multiple authors. My book, Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (2nd edn., Oxford, 2018; henceforth Harris, 2018), reviews the wide-ranging research and analysis on Dido since 1987. In general, however, the source situation remains unchanged. The earliest Dido scores date from the 1770s, nearly a century after the opera was first performed, and the original state of the work cannot be determined with absolute assurance.