The Drama of the Passions: Tate and Purcell's Characterization of Dido

Abstract

ABOUT 1689-1690, Josias Priest, the dancing master at a girls' school in Chelsea, asked Henry Purcell to write a chamber opera for the school to perform. The opera that Purcell wrote with Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas, is still effective and moves us today. Many critics have remarked on the opera's surprising unity and attribute it to Purcell's genial musical setting of Tate's pedestrian verse.' But it is the libretto describing Dido' passions that actually provides the unity. Baroque aesthetics are essential to Tate and Purcell's achievement, particularly ideas about the artistic portrayal of passions. Strictly speaking, the unity of Dido and Aeneas is not a unity of action but a unity of form. It derives from Tate and Purcell's combined intentions to depict the movement of passions that leads up to Dido's lament, the opera's climactic moment. To shape the drama and portray Dido's passions, the authors use conventions of seventeenth-century faculty-psychology -theories about the human soul and its passions. The relationship of the parts of the soul and the role of the passions, as described in seventeenth-century theoretical works, provides the basis for