"Dido and Aeneas" an Opera Henry Purcell Norton Critical Score HB 1986 Norton Co

Description: A NORTON CRITICAL SCORES Henry Purcell DIDO AND AENEAS An Opera An Authoritative Score Historical Background • A Critical Edition of the Libretto Criticism and Analysis • Production and Interpretation Edited by CURTIS PRICE KING'S COLLEGE LONDON W • W • NORTON & COMPANY New York • London Copyright © 1986 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Composition by JGH Composition, Inc. Manufacturing by The Murray Printing Company. FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Purcell, Henry, 1659-1695. (Dido and Aeneas (Norton critical scores) Libretto by Nahum Tate. 1. Operas - Scores. I. Price, Curtis Alexander, 1945-II. Tate, Nahum, 1652-1715. Ibt. III. Title. IV. Series. M1500. P98D4 1986 86-750870 ISBN 0-393-02407-5 ISBN 0-393-95528-1 PBK • INTRODUCTION Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is one of the greatest operas composed between Monteverdi's lifetime and Mozart's. Its potential to move modern audiences through tragic irony is almost unrivalled, even when acted by adolescents, as it was at the premiere in 1689. Yet it is in almost every way anomalous: a tragic, English opera created at a time when operas were hardly ever tragic and when England had no real opera. Partly for this reason, Purcell's masterpiece lay forgotten and unperformed for nearly one hundred years, was debased and disfigured in the nineteenth century, and has been alternately praised and belittled - often for the wrong reasons-since Edward Gordon Craig's landmark revival in 1900. One of the reasons Dido has been so badly misunderstood is because it is usually deemed, incorrectly, to be the culmination of Purcell's stage career rather than a modest prolegomenon. His association with the professional theatre began, if one disregards a few sporadic attempts in the early 1680s, with the lavish production of Dioclesian at Dorset Garden in June 1690, more than a year after the premiere of Dido. Dioclesian, like all of Purcell's subsequent major stage works, is a semi-opera or "dramatick opera," that is, a five-act, spoken tragi-comedy with masques and entertainments sung by minor, often unnamed, characters. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators have regarded these large works as forming a corrupt sub-operatic genre on which Purcell squandered his genius. Through ignorance, they have talled to appreciate that on the whole, they include much tiner music than Dido: longer-breathed melodies, more sophisticated harmony and counter-point, and more richly developed characters. Not a shred of evidence has ever been produced to show that Purcell was dissatisfied with semi-opera or frustrated at not being able to follow Dido with another through-composed music drama. Yet, among all of Purcell's works, only Dido,

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