Purcell's Dido Research Articles

‘Laid in Earth’: Physical Touches in Valera's Pepita Jiménez

Valera is often thought of as a very refined writer, with a decided interest in the loftier pursuits of metaphysics and religion, and given the subject matter of Pepita Jiménez, it is inevitable that theological and ecclesiastical issues surface in it. His novels, although noted for the rather high-minded tone of their discourse and ideas, also give due weight to the physical, earthly circumstances of the protagonists, as exemplified in this article by an analysis of Pepita Jiménez. The famous phrase ‘laid in earth’, adapted from Nahum Tate's libretto for Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, is applicable to the way in which Valera in Pepita Jiménez prepares us for its denouement. By presenting us from the beginning of the novel with examples from the physical world, of touching and kissing, and from social, cultural and sporting encounters that require physical involvement, Valera sows the seed for the commitment of the protagonists to a life grounded in the daily social round and in the earthly, and earthy, environment that they inhabit.

Purcell's Dido and the Fate of Mark Morris: Figure 1

Purcell's Dido and the Fate of Mark Morris: Figure 1

Which Genial Day? More on the court origin of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, with a shortlist of dates for its possible performance before King Charles II

This article attempts to pinpoint the occasion for which Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell created Dido and Aeneas. To do this it makes further use of iconographic evidence first presented in an earlier paper (Andrew Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina: a royal witness to the court origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, xl/2 (2012), pp.265–78); considers fresh textual evidence (the anonymous libretto for John Blow’s 1681 royal birthday ode Up, shepherds, up, anticipating Tate’s Dido prologue in some striking ways); brings newly discovered documentary evidence into play (a newsletter report confirming that Dryden’s Albion and Albanius was rehearsed at Windsor on 29 May 1684, Charles II’s birthday); and tentatively reconstructs a chain of cultural-historical events consistent with all available research data. Very obvious allegorical meaning can now be discerned in both scenes of the Dido prologue (‘Deus ex machina’ only looked at scene 1). The nature of the allegory strongly suggests that Dido was performed or meant for performance as a birthday tribute to Charles II—most likely in 1684, soon after the formal completion of his ten-year castle refurbishment project, the Windsor Castle ‘Great Works’. ‘Which Genial Day?’ should be read in conjunction with ‘Deus ex machina’

Deus ex machina: a royal witness to the court * origin of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

Towards the end of his reign Charles II initiated an ambitious cultural propaganda programme celebrating final victory over his political opponents. In 1683 work began on a new royal palace at Winchester, supposedly on the site of King Arthur’s castle. At Windsor, meanwhile, a ten-year castle modernization scheme known as the ‘Great Works’ neared completion. The Windsor state apartments had been sumptuously remodelled. Antonio Verrio, the Neopolitan artist commissioned to paint every state apartment ceiling, brought his work to a triumphant conclusion in St George’s Hall, home to the Knights of the Garter (the neo-Arthurian chivalric order over which Charles II presided). All but three of Verrio’s ceilings were destroyed in the 1820s. But guidebooks published prior to that describe them in detail. Portions appear in the engravings illustrating W.H. Pyne’s The History of the Royal Residences (vol. i, 1819). Pierre Vandrebanc produced engraved views of several in the 1680s. Verrio’s blatantly allegorical designs are recoverable therefore. The extent to which they influenced masques and operas also intended to honour Charles II can be demonstrated. This paper argues that Purcell’s Dido librettist, Nahum Tate, gathered visual-allegorical material from two Windsor ceilings and used it to generate singable text. ‘Phœbus Rises in the Chariot’ at the start of the Dido prologue. Phoebus, riding the chariot of the sun in Verrio’s ceiling portrait (an allegory of the restoration, unequivocally) wore the ‘Sacred Head’ of Charles II, not that of James or any later monarch – an observation which future contributors to Dido dating debate may wish to take into account.

Creative Ambivalence and Precarious Futures: Women in British Theatre

Creative Ambivalence and Precarious Futures:Women in British Theatre Janelle Reinelt (bio) Is that cup half full or half empty? I find it hard to decide . . . When I wrote about Michelene Wandor for Lynda Hart's Making a Spectacle (1989), she was exemplary for connecting the women's movement to theatre in Britain through her multiple roles as critic, historian, playwright, and activist.1 At the time, I thought that her multi-vocal activity was not only ideal, but was bound to become the model for future women's writing about/in the theatre. From my vantage point today, over twenty years later, I cannot say this prediction has come true. Women writers today are much more likely to be self-contained within their own writing agendas, not connected to other women's groups or committed to speaking on behalf of feminist theatre. This is, by now, an old story: the loss of a movement, the neoliberal emphasis on singular achievement, women playwrights reluctant to identify as "women" playwrights, and so on. However, when I look at women's writing in the UK today, I do have cause for some optimism about the presence of significant women's writing, supported by a number of well-placed artistic directors or other institutional benefactors. Furthermore, there is a striking diversity of fresh and strong voices. Whereas Wandor's The Wandering Jew (1987) was one of the first plays by a contemporary British woman opening on a mainstage of the National Theatre, this past year (2009-10) has seen a number of important plays by women on major institutional and commercial stages: four at the National and eight at the Royal Court (the premiere theatre for new writing in the UK). A theatre like the Young Vic, with a shorter season, hosted three, and the Tricycle Theatre, London's most important political theatre just now, commissioned eleven new short plays by women for its special season called "Women, Power and Politics."2 In addition to new writing, there has also been a number of landmark productions by [End Page 553] women directors and/or actors, such as the highly acclaimed Mother Courage, played by Fiona Shaw and directed by Deborah Warner at the National, and After Dido, based on Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in an innovative multimedia production by Katie Mitchell for the Young Vic. Mitchell, who is now associate director at the National, received the Order of the British Empire in 2009. The authors are a mix of familiar playwrights from an earlier time (Caryl Churchill and Bryony Lavery); writers having a second or third success, such as Alia Bano and Polly Stenham; and new writers making debuts, such as Anupama Chandrasekhar, Anya Reiss, and Molly Davies. debbie tucker green is having a revival of her 2008 play Random at the Royal Court and then it will tour—a second production of a contemporary play is an infrequent event, even for established white male writers, so this is a good sign for one of the most prominent and respected of younger-generation playwrights, bar none. The fact that green is female and black is just one bit of evidence of the increasing diversity of writers on British stages; it is almost possible to think that the theatre might finally be catching up with the fact of the multicultural society it represents. An interesting example, from multiple points of view, is Bola Agbaje. She came through the Critical Mass Programme (a yearly writing workshop for black, Asian, and minority ethnic playwrights run by the Royal Court since 2004). Her first play, Gone Too Far!, premiered at the Royal Court in 2007, winning an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement and a Most Promising Playwright nomination at the Evening Standard Awards 2008. Her plays If Things Were Different, In Time, and Anything You Can Do were produced at the Soho Theatre, Detaining Justice opened as part of the "Not Black and White" season at the Tricycle in November 2009, and, most recently, Off the Endz played at the Royal Court in March 2010. Off the Endz is built around a triangle, not primarily about sex but about economics: Kojo and Sharon are striving for...

French opera, ballet and cantata

As 17th-century school operas go, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas may be the best known but it is certainly not the only one. In France, for example, Jesuit educators had already latched on to the popular appeal of opera. Within little more than a decade of Lully's establishment of the tragédie en musique in the 1670s they had adapted the genre to their own ends. Why, after all, should the Opéra have all the best tunes? It was for the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand, the most prestigious school in Paris, that Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote his ‘tragédie biblique’ David et Jonathas. The work was performed there in 1688, one year before Purcell's little masterpiece at Josias Priest's rather less august institution. Apart from its sacred theme, Charpentier's opera differs most strikingly from Dido in its extraordinary structure. Sandwiched between the prologue and each of the five acts was a five-act Latin tragedy...

The Masque of Actaeon and the Antimasque of Mercury: Dance, Dramatic Structure, and Tragic Exposition in Dido and Aeneas

Abstract Problems associated with the main surviving sources of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (the 1688 “Priest” libretto and GB-Ob MS Tenbury 1266) have resulted in the persistence of fundamental misconceptions regarding the scope and nature of the work. Through a detailed examination of the “deleted dances” and their relationship to other components, such as choruses, it is possible to reconstruct what the original piece may have looked like. This process prompts a reconsideration of the “Grove Scene” in act 2, which is shown to contain a masque–antimasque pair featuring Aeneas in the role of Actaeon and the Sorceress's Spirit playing the part of Mercury. In contrast to the conventional structure in which the masque triumphs over the antimasque, in Dido the opposite is true, a circumstance that underscores and effectuates the tragic nature of the work.

Beaune International Festival of Baroque Opera

Among the plethora of summer music festivals in France, that at the delightful town of Beaune, not far south of Dijon in Burgundy, must rate among the most innovative and impressive in both quality of repertory and of execution. The reason for Beaune's unity of purpose and high standards is not far to seek: throughout its 26 years it has been the vision of one person of remarkable foresight and energy, Anne Blanchard. The substantial subventions she has managed to obtain facilitate not only the festival's concert performances of Baroque operas (many rarely performed elsewhere), but also its important sectors of sacred music and instrumental works. Equally notable is Blanchard's commitment to showcasing the best of young soloists and conductors on their way to fame, alongside those already well established. The second weekend of this year's festival was typical of this diverse approach. Friday evening's programme included a persuasive and stylish interpretation of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, with Paul McCreesh unobtrusively directing his Gabrieli Consort and Players. If almost the whole cast were English performers for whom Purcell is mother's milk, the Zagreb soprano, Renata Pokupic, was a committed and convincing Dido with a clarity of enunciation that sopranos in the minor roles could have emulated to advantage. Ronan Collett did the best one can with the rather pallid character of Aeneas, while the countertenor Daniel Taylor's Sorceress balanced evil and humour in a very plausible, entertaining and energetic characterization. The chorus managed their changes of mood with skill and gilt-edged diction, while balance between singers and players always permitted the former to be heard. All in all, this was a Dido and Aeneas to be remembered. The first half of the evening, consisting of three of Purcell's finest anthems (My beloved spake, Let mine eyes run down with tears and O sing unto the Lord), gave us a chance to hear some of the outstanding solo singers in the Oxbridge-style chorus, most notably the bass, William Gaunt.

Melancholia (review)

Reviewed by: Melancholia Chantal Rodríguez Melancholia. Collective creation by The Latino Theater Company Laboratory. Directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela. Cultural Reconstruction Series, Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles. 14 June 2007. The Latino Theater Company's recent production of Melancholia seamlessly blended influences from the early Chicano theatre movement with contemporary political issues and elements of European theatrical tradition to stage the widespread devastation of warfare. By following the journey of an East LA marine, the play explores the increasingly high rate of suicide among soldiers returning from Iraq. Created collectively by the company's laboratory of new actors in 2003, the piece grew out of community based research, improvisations, and workshops, premiering at the Edge of the World Festival in October 2005. As the Iraq war rages on and both sides suffer the consequences, the Latino Theater Company chose to remount the production for the Los Angeles Theater Center's Cultural Reconstruction Series in the spring of 2007. The audience entered a small black-box theatre where a minimalist set and low whispers greeted them, setting the tone for the production, which was purposefully unpredictable, nonlinear, and highly theatrical. The play began in darkness with a haunting aria from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, titled "Dido's Lament." After the echoes of the aria faded, several soldiers ran across the stage and exited through an illuminated door. Two fools/clowns, Tar (Fidel Gomez) and Skittles (Carmen Corral), managed to stop one soldier, Mario, from going "into the light"; determined to save his soul, they decide to go back and replay the events of his life to try to save him from the darkness of melancholy. The scenes shift to various moments in Mario's past, which illuminate his life choices and offer insight into his worsening alcoholism and insomnia as he distances himself from family and friends, struggling to forget the unspeakable acts that haunt him every time he closes his eyes. With Melancholia, the Latino Theater Company continues to mine an aesthetic grounded in the techniques of the early Chicano theatre movement by combining minimalist staging with music, dance, ritual, and haunting imagery. The production also reflected influences and didactic methods associated with the movement's early styles: actos, collectively created, improvised agitprop scenes; mitos, or myths; and corridos, Chicano storytelling songs. In addition to Melancholia's collective and improvisation-based creation, the production also shared elements traditional to these pieces, including the use of Brechtian devices, strategic use of music and song, a bilingual script rich with Chicano slang, and classic Chicano characters such as La Muerte (Death). Melancholia bears a striking similarity to Soldado Razo, an early Chicano acto performed to protest the Vietnam War during the Chicano Moratorium in 1971. Theatrical similarities between the plays include a strong antiwar theme, a focus on the role of the family in Chicano culture, the integral role of La Muerte in the central character's life, and the use of whiteface makeup, here used on the entire cast. This visual technique was highly successful, serving as a constant reminder of the death that haunts Mario and foreshadows his demise, while also allowing each actor to slip into several roles. Three different actors played the role of Mario (Ramiro Segovia, Sam Golzari, and Michael Esparza) and often occupied the stage at the same time, a choice that also contributed to the play's Brechtian tactics. The production's incorporation of European elements was also evident in its juxtaposition of Shakespearean dialogue from Hamlet with contemporary language and Chicano slang to create profound insights into mortality with dialogue accessible to the community audience. Throughout the evening, several key moments in Mario's tumultuous journey through his past emphasized the didactic nature of this production, solidifying the play's antiwar message. For example, a reenactment of a military-recruitment commercial was played in the form of a full-blown doo-wop musical number. Melancholia suggested the subversively glamorous recruiting techniques of the military: offering money for college, travel, adventure, respect, and, of course, women and sex. Although the military's specific recruitment of minorities in lower-income families could have been more explicit, Mario's desire to join the...

Singing actors and dancing singers: Oscillations of genre, physical and vocal codes in two contemporary adaptations of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

By looking at two recent and widely recognized productions of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (by choreographer Sasha Waltz, Berlin 2005, and theatre-director Sebastian Nubling, Basel 2006) this article discusses three main aspects: 1. Genre: Coming from a Tanztheater (Waltz) and a Sprechtheater (Nubling) background, both directors renegotiate conventions of the operatic genre, and consciously evade clear allocations in pursuit of a new and challenging experience for both the performers and their audience. 2. Physicality: Both productions place the performers’ bodies at the forefront of the mise en scene’s attention – they re-map the singing, dancing, acting body by questioning conventions and expectations commonly found in the production and reception process. 3. Adaptation: Both productions take unconventional liberties by adapting in a domain, where notions of Werktreue (fidelity to the original work or score) still reigns. Adopting ideas from Nicholas Cook and Mikhail Bakhtin, I will argue that the conceptual, musical and theatrical implications of both productions indicate a re-negotiation of the social and performative relevance of operatic performance.

Singing actors and dancing singers: Oscillations of genre, physical and vocal codes in two contemporary adaptations of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

This article looks at two recent and widely recognized productions of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (by choreographer Sasha Waltz, Berlin 2005, and theatre director Sebastian Nbling, Basel 2006) and discusses three main aspects: 1. Genre: coming from a Tanztheater (Waltz) and a Sprechtheater (Nbling) background, each director renegotiates conventions of the operatic genre and consciously evades expectations in pursuit of a new and challenging experience for both the performers and their audience. 2. Physicality: both productions place the performers' bodies at the forefront of the mise-en-scne they remap the singing, dancing, acting body by questioning conventions and expectations commonly found in the production and reception process. 3. Adaptation: both productions take unconventional liberties by adapting in a domain where notions of Werktreue (fidelity to the original work or score) still reign. Adopting ideas from Nicholas Cook and Mikhail Bakhtin, I will argue that the conceptual, musical and theatrical implications of both productions indicate a renegotiation of the social and performative relevance of operatic performance.

'A Present for the Ladies': Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell's Dido

'A Present for the Ladies': Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell's Dido

In Search of Dido

As an introduction to ground-bass techniques, and as one of the great moments in operatic literature, Dido's Lament, from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, has long been a favored topic in academic courses on both the history and the analysis of Western tonal music. This essay approaches an analysis of the Lament from literary and recent historical perspectives. It returns to Virgil's Aeneid in search of the Dido who served as the starting point for so many subsequent characterizations of her, including Purcell's and his librettist Nahum Tate's. The analysis considers specifically musical means through which Purcell and Tate restore to Dido the nobility and greatness of spirit she manifests when we first meet her in Virgil's tale.

‘The dating of Purcell's Dido and Aenas’?

‘The dating of Purcell's Dido and Aenas’?

The earliest notice of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

The earliest notice of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

‘Unscarr’d by turning times'?: The dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

Dido and Aeneas was first performed in 1689 by the young lady pupils at Josias Priest's Chelsea boardingschool. It was offered as a loyal tribute to William and Mary on their coronation day, 21 April, or on Mary's birthday, 30 April Priest had commissioned it specially; the librettist and composer took care not to over-stretch the modest resources of the school. These points, long established by scholars, serve to support the impressive edifice of modern commentary on Dido and Aeneas. Yet a careful survey suggests that the building is founded on sand

Structural Meaning and Music Education

In music education, the search for the good inevitably comes around to discussions of musical meaning and aesthetic validity. Such inquiry is essential to a clarification of both musical and educational purposes. Conceived broadly, we can distinguish three approaches to musical meaning pictorial, associative, and structural. The pictorial is imageconnotative, depending largely on word painting, e.g., frogs and flies in Handel's Israel in Egypt, the spring-river in Smetana's Moldau. Associative meanings, derived from the doctrine of affections, evoke metaphorical or allegorical connotations, e.g., fate music in Carmen, Scarpia's motif in Tosca, chromatic weeping in the Crucifixis of Bach's B Minor Mass and in Dido's Lament of Purcell's Dido and

Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

Although Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera which most people remember today, it is wrong to think that it was the first operatic work to be seen in London. That honour belongs to a through-composed French work, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus. This opera was performed only once, and that was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 30 March 1674. The music was the work of the French composer, Louis Grabu, who at that time was attached to the English court as Composer of the King's Musick. Then, about the same period, two English operas were seen at The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden. One was a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the other was Psyche by Thomas Shadwell, but both of these pieces included spoken dialogue and do not concern us here. But a decade later, in 1685, the through-composed opera by Dryden and Grabu, Albion and Albanius, was given six performances at The Duke's Theatre. So it was Ariane and this work that were the predecessors of Purcell's opera.