Name: Dido and Aeneas
Start: 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Royal Academy of Music

Artist

Admin

Soprano

Julia Portela Piñón

Dido

Conductor

Elizabeth Kenny

Stage director

Jack Furness

Costume designer

Laura Jane Stanfield

Set designer

Tenor

Patrick Alexander Keefe

Aeneas

Mezzo-soprano

Giulia Laudano

Second woman

Lighting designer

Clare O'Donoghue

Choreographer

Victoria Newlyn

Sophie Sparrow

Belinda

Will Pate

Sorceress

Josi Ann Ellem

First witch

Angharad Rowlands

Second witch

Nina Korbe

Spirit

Singer

Clara Orif

soprano

Jack Lee

bass

Royal Academy Opera

Orchestra

Academy Baroque Orchestra

Dido and Aeneas

London

United Kingdom

Royal Academy of Music

Public

Private

Approved

Dido and Aeneas Purcell

Æneas, the Son of Venus and Anchises, having, at the Destruction of Troy, sav’d his Gods, his Father, and son Ascanius, from the Fire, put to Sea with twenty Sail of Ships: and, having been long tost with Tempests, was at last cast upon the shore of Lybia, where queen Dido (flying from the cruelty of Pygmalion, her Brother, who had kill’d her Husband Sichæus) had lately built Carthage. She entertain’d Æneas and his Fleet with great civility, fell passionately in Love with him, and in the end denied him not the last Favours. But Mercury admonishing Æneas to go in search of Italy, (a Kingdom promis’d him by the Gods) he readily prepar’d to Obey…

—John Dryden, headnote introducing ‘Dido to Æneas’ in Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands (London, 1680).

Virgil told the same story at greater length in the Æneid, Book IV. When Æneas sails for Italy, Dido kills herself, unable to live with the pain of betrayal. Purcell’s librettist, Nahum Tate, blended Shakespeare and Virgil very cleverly, turning the spiteful goddess Juno, implacable enemy of all things Trojan and Æneas in particular, into a Sorceress and Witches who seem to be much more comprehensively malicious – like their counterparts in Macbeth (which Purcell’s contemporaries also knew in an operatic version).

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