Purcell - Dido & Aeneas

Dido's lament and death (with a very effective final 30 seconds)
from Henry Purcell's opera

Dido & Aeneas

Dido and Aeneas (1689) was the first English opera to find a permanent place in the repertoire. The climax of the score occurs when Dido, deserted by the Trojan Aeneas so that he may go found the city of Rome and father Western civilization, cries in music her famous Lament:

Thy hand, Belinda; darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but death invades me,
Death is now a welcome guest.

When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.


This most famous excerpt from the opera, Dido and Aeneas, can be counted among the finest moments in all of opera. Deserted by her lover, Aeneas, Dido sings her final lament, knowing that she must die without him. She sings first to her handmaiden, Belinda, in a tender and affecting recitative; the aria which follows is built on a five-bar ground bass. Purcell's manipulation of this compositional device, as well as his scrupulous avoidance of sentimental indulgence accounts for the scene's fame. Richard Wagner must surely have known of this scene when he composed his own "Love-Death" (Liebestod) in Tristan und Isolde.


Sacchi's 17th century painting, Dido Abandoned



























Dido was princess of Tyre in Phoenicia. Escaping tyranny in her country, she came to what is now Tunisia where she founded Carthage, a great city which Aeneas and his comrades, who had become refugees after the sack of Troy, visited seven years after the end of the Trojan War. As Queen of Carthage, she received the Trojans exiles with hospitality, and having given Aeneas more love than he could take, felt betrayed when he left for Italy, and committed suicide.