Carthage, in mythical times. The hero Aeneas, who escaped from burning Troy and crossed the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa with his ships, meets the beautiful Queen Dido. Love fills them - and yet they don't get together because fate calls. Aeneas moves away to Italy to found a new kingdom there, while the abandoned Dido has no way out.
Henry Purcell composed only one »proper« opera in 1689, a work of particularly melodic inventiveness. The story of the hero and the Carthaginian ruler, so impressively told in Virgil's epic »Aeneid«, found its echo in music that was no less haunting. Human passions appear undisguised, the joys and excitements as well as the needs and sorrows, to the deepest despair at the inexorability of the divine will. Dido's famous lament, with which she ends her life and the opera, demonstrates Purcell's extraordinary expressiveness in opening up an entire world with just a few notes. But also his ability to write dance movements and choruses with great abundance of melodies and rhythmic conciseness, makes »Orpheus Britannicus«, highly esteemed by his contemporaries and admired by posterity, appear as a truly exceptional composer. Singing, playing and dancing combine to form a special form of theatre.