The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Henry Purcell · an opera in three acts, to a libretto in English by Nahum Tate after Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid · scored as it survives: the three acts of the earliest score read beside Tate’s printed libretto, with the music of the prologue and of the witches’ scene that ended Act II lost · about an hour of music
Mode
Tragic opera sung through in English, in short numbers joined by recitative, with the choruses and dances of a court, a cave and a harbour
Mythos
The queen abandoned by the hero whom fate calls to found an empire, the fate here forged by witches; Actaeon destroyed in the grove; a descending ground as an end that cannot be resisted
Phase
From a court’s triumph to a queen’s death: a palace, a cave, a grove broken by a storm, a harbour, the palace again
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in three acts setting Tate’s English, scored as it survives, without the music of the prologue or of the witches’ scene that ended Act II
Register
From the witches’ laughing choruses and the sailors’ song to recitative raised into song and a lament on a ground
Scale
Dido, Belinda, a Second Woman, Aeneas, the Sorceress and two witches, a Spirit in the form of Mercury, a Sailor; chorus, strings and continuo; about an hour
Governing Proposition
A queen who grieves before she has a cause accepts the Trojan hero who has come to her court; witches who hate her for no reason given forge a summons from the gods, he obeys it and then offers to stay, and she sends him away and dies. The wager of the work is that great minds conspire against themselves, and that an end which cannot be resisted can be heard as a bass that will not stop.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Tate’s printed libretto opens with a prologue. Its words survive and its music does not, so the opera as it stands begins with an overture and then the palace at Carthage. Belinda urges the queen to cheer: “Shake the cloud”. Dido answers with her first air, “Ah! Belinda”, and it is torment with no cause yet named. Nothing has happened. The grief is already in her.
The air is built on a ground: a figure in the bass repeated again and again, over which the voice moves and which the voice cannot change. Four numbers in the opera are made this way, and two of them are Dido’s first air and her last. The form says before the plot does that she is singing inside a pattern she will not leave. The court reads the cause as love for the Trojan guest: “Grief increases by concealing”, and then “Fear no danger”.
Aeneas enters and asks for her, and Dido assents. The marriage is policy as well as love, two crowns joined, “When monarchs unite”. The chorus sings “Pursue thy conquest, Love”, and the act ends in the court’s triumph, “To the hills and the vales” and the Triumphing Dance, the second of the grounds. It is brief, and it carries a queen from dread to a public yes.
Movement II
A cave. The Sorceress calls up her company, “Wayward sisters”, and tells them her purpose, which is Dido’s ruin. The text gives no reason for it. The witches hate Dido as the court loves her, wholly and without argument, and they answer the plan with laughing choruses.
The plan is a forgery. A spirit in the form of Mercury will command Aeneas, in the name of the gods, to leave. In Virgil the gods send that summons. Tate gives it to witches and makes it counterfeit, so that the founding of Rome is set in motion by a lie. The work sets the change up and does not return to it.
The scene closes with “In our deep vaulted cell”, an echo chorus, and an Echo Dance of Furies. The destroyers’ music is the court’s choruses turned inside out. The terror here is of the theatre, lower than Dido’s, and it is the witches of the London stage, the Macbeth tradition, who stand where Virgil’s gods stood.
Movement III
A grove, where the court rests from the hunt. “Thanks to these lonesome vales”, Belinda sings. The Second Woman tells a story on a ground, “Oft she visits”: the tale of Actaeon, the hunter destroyed in a grove. Aeneas comes in with the head of a boar he has killed. The hunter’s ruin is told in the grove where the hunt has just been.
It is a lovely digression that foreshadows by allusion only, and the storm cuts it off. “Haste, haste to town”, Belinda cries, and the court scatters. Aeneas is left alone, and the Spirit in the form of Mercury gives him the command. He resolves to obey, and is left to his soliloquy. He does not know the command is forged.
Then the music stops. Tate’s libretto goes on, with a scene for the Sorceress and her witches, a chorus and a dance, after Aeneas’s soliloquy; the score has no music for it. The act therefore ends in a different key from the one it began in, the only act whose frame does not close, and the plainest internal sign of the loss. Later editions, Britten’s among them, have supplied music for the gap. That music is not the work, and the silence is part of what survives.
Movement IV
The harbour. The sailors make ready to sail: “Come away, fellow sailors”, a careless song of leaving the nymphs on shore with promises no one means to keep. It is the parting to come, sung as a joke. The Sorceress and her witches come to watch their work, and sing “Destruction’s our delight”, and dance.
The palace. Aeneas comes to Dido. He has obeyed the command, and now he offers to stay. She refuses him: “Away, away!” Whether he means the offer the text leaves open. Her refusal is what kills her, and whether she dies of grief or by her own hand it does not say.
The chorus states the work’s sentence: “Great minds against themselves conspire”. Pride, honour and love do not resolve, and no god comes down to resolve them. The great mind destroys itself, and the witches’ delight and the queen’s ruin are the same event seen from two sides. There is no reprieve to come, no apotheosis and no machine.
Movement V
Dido turns to Belinda: “Thy hand, Belinda”, a recitative in which speech is raised into song without loss of either. Then the Lament, on the last of the grounds. The bass is a falling chromatic line, the old emblem of lament, known before Purcell in Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa (1638) and in Cavalli’s laments, which he fills in by semitones. The voice’s phrases are set across the ground, so that her cadences and its cadences do not coincide.
She sinks over it, and “Remember me”, repeated, climbs to its high note; a second clause asks that her fate be forgotten. Then the voice stops and the strings go on over the ground alone. The bass that would not be argued with is still going after she has gone. The last act closes in the Lament’s key. The chorus answers with “With drooping wings”, grief made common in falling lines and suspensions, and the opera ends.
The earliest documented performance was at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls in Chelsea, for which Tate’s libretto was printed; when the work was first made, and for whom, is argued. No score in Purcell’s hand survives, and the earliest score was copied decades after his death in 1695. The opera was all but silent from about 1700 to the later nineteenth century. Since the mid-twentieth century it has been continuously present, in houses, schools and colleges, and recorded from Kirsten Flagstad and Janet Baker onward. What it knows has survived its losses: an hour of music in which the end is heard from the first air, as a bass she can sing against and cannot leave.
Act III · The Twelve
Compression is the work’s first law. A whole book of Virgil is told in about an hour, and most numbers last a minute or two. Aeneas proposes, Dido assents, the witches plot, a storm breaks the hunt, a false Mercury commands, he resolves to sail, she sends him away, she dies: nothing is told twice. The subtractive test meets resistance in Dido’s two grounds, the cave, the Spirit’s command, the parting and the Lament. It finds give in four places: “Oft she visits”, which foreshadows by allusion only; the sailors and the witches’ dance in Act III, spectacle the action does not need; the Triumphing Dance; and witches who hate Dido for no reason the text gives.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the chorus states it: “Great minds against themselves conspire”. Dido grieves before anything happens. “Ah! Belinda” is torment with no cause yet named, as if the abandonment were already in her. When Aeneas, having obeyed the command, offers to stay, she refuses him, and the refusal kills her. Pride, honour and love do not resolve, and the Lament asks that she be remembered and her fate forgotten. Sound discloses what the words do not: the ground that will not stop. Held a tenth below the gate by the thinness of everyone but Dido. Aeneas is a cipher, the witches are malice without a mind, and the forged destiny is never examined.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The work reaches the top of the art once and nearly reaches it several times. The Lament is the summit: a voice sinking over a chromatic ground, its phrases set across the ground so that their cadences do not coincide, the repeated “Remember me” climbing to its high note, and the strings going on over the ground after the voice has stopped. “With drooping wings” makes the grief communal in falling lines and suspensions. “Ah! Belinda” is the sublime of dread in small; the echo chorus and the storm give a lower, theatrical terror. Frequency holds it below Otello at 9.4: the dances, the sailors and Belinda’s courtly airs are charm, and in an hour a large share is charm.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetype is Virgil’s: the queen abandoned by the hero whom fate calls to found an empire. Tate makes one change that bears weight. The gods give way to witches, and the summons by Mercury is counterfeit, so that the founding of Rome is set in motion by a lie. Inside Act II a second figure is built, Actaeon, the hunter destroyed in a grove, told in the grove where Aeneas has just killed a boar. Purcell builds a third, the descending ground as an end that cannot be resisted: fate is heard as a bass. Held a tenth below the gate because the particular stays thin. Dido is a type more than a woman, Aeneas never reaches the founder, and the forgery of fate is set up and dropped.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the English masque and court entertainment, the French tragédie lyrique of Lully and the Italian lament; John Blow’s Venus and Adonis had already shown an all-sung English stage work ending in a death. The departures are real: a full tragedy sung through in English and compressed to an hour; an English recitative bent to the stress of the language, not to French or Italian rhetoric; the witches of the London stage’s Macbeth tradition in place of Virgil’s gods; an ending with no reprieve, no apotheosis and no machine. The stake was small: a school performance, a form Blow had shown, and no further risk taken in the genre, since Purcell turned afterwards to semi-operas for the public stage.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The ground bass is the instrument of the knowledge. Dido’s first air and her last are both on grounds, and a ground is a form in which the bass cannot be argued with: her grief is a pattern she can sing against but not leave, and in the Lament the voice’s phrases, set across the ground, make the struggle audible. The witches’ echo chorus is the court’s choruses turned inside out. Short numbers joined by recitative give the hour its speed, a tragedy in which events arrive faster than reflection. Held down by the broken frame of Act II, where the form the work had is not the form that survives, and by the dances, containers of the school stage.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence of return is real, and mostly of the last century: Curtis Price’s Henry Purcell and the London Stage (1984) and his Norton Critical Score (1986); Ellen T. Harris’s Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1987); and the debates over the date, the occasion and a reading of the work as a warning to William III. The questions stay open: whether Dido dies of grief or by her own hand, since the text does not say; why the witches act; whether Aeneas means his offer to stay; what the lost music held, and what the prologue meant. Performance is unsettled on Dido’s voice, on the Sorceress, bass or mezzo, and on the continuo. Held down by volume: the literature is smaller than the work’s place would suggest.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of opera and English theatre music of the 1680s. The force is real: the work showed that tragedy could be sung through in English and that English recitative could carry it, and within English music nothing like it came for two centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own time the reach was close to none, and English opera went to Handel’s Italian model. Delayed reach is credited and discounted: the revivals from the 1890s, Britten’s edition, and Britten’s English operas, which owe much to Purcell’s word-setting across many works rather than to this one alone. The ground-bass lament it made famous was an emblem it inherited.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives in three legible acts, but the text is doubtful and partly lost. No score in Purcell’s hand survives; the earliest score was copied decades after his death in 1695; the prologue’s music is gone, and so is the witches’ scene that ended Act II. The losses take a framing allegory and a scene, not the centre. Presence came late: a long silence from about 1700 to the later nineteenth century, then revival, and since the mid-twentieth century continuous presence in houses, schools and colleges, recorded from Kirsten Flagstad and Janet Baker onward. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and both charges, lost text and long silence, hold the figure low.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. Purcell’s setting of English is the making that bears the work: stress, length and pitch follow the language, and recitatives such as “Thy hand, Belinda” are speech raised into song without loss of either. The grounds are handled with complete freedom over strict repetition. The suspensions and chromatic harmony of the Lament and the final chorus are as expressive as any of the century, and the choruses are short and exactly placed. The costs: Tate’s verse, part of the work, is often plain and sometimes sing-song, worst in the witches’ rhymes; the string writing as transmitted is spare; the dances are serviceable. Level with The Creation; Otello stands at 9.5.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the witches’ laughing chorus and the Lament. One law joins them. Destruction is the delight of the destroyers and the fate of the destroyed, and “Destruction’s our delight” is sung in the act where Dido destroys herself. The echo chorus in the cave answers the court’s choruses; the sailors’ careless farewell to their nymphs parodies the parting to come; the last act closes in the key of the Lament. The strains are real: the witches act without cause, so their law is asserted, not shown; the false Mercury is a device the work does not return to; and the frame of Act II, as it survives, does not close. The law holds by mirror more than by necessity.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Many orders are held in one hour: consciousness, in Dido; love; the state, in a queen whose marriage is policy, “When monarchs unite”, and a Rome that waits offstage; history and myth, in Troy behind and Rome ahead; the supernatural, in the witches and a counterfeit god; the natural order, in the grove, the hunt and the storm; the common people, in the sailors; death and memory. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is that most of these are held in passing: the state is a line, Rome a destination, the sailors a song. The family, the household beyond the court and the sacred as faith do not appear, and the orders are joined by mirror rather than by depth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, then The Sublime at 8.9, and The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.8. A setting of English in which stress, length and pitch follow the language and recitative becomes song; a Lament at the top of the art, with the final chorus and Dido’s first air near it; a form in which the ground bass is the knowledge, her first air and her last both on grounds; and three legible acts present without a break since the mid-twentieth century, whatever was lost around them.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: love, the state, myth, the supernatural, nature, the common people and death are held in one hour, but most in passing, and the family and the sacred as faith do not appear. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, a reach close to none in its own time and delayed two centuries; then The Swerve at 8.0, a real turn taken on a short road Blow had opened, for a school stage.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 fall short by a tenth, The Swerve at 8.0 by five tenths and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 by six. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate, 8.5, stands in the band of Tier IV and below the 9.0 the summit requires in any case.
Basis · the score of Dido and Aeneas, Tate’s libretto and the work’s performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored as it survives: the three acts as transmitted in the earliest score, read beside Tate’s printed libretto, with Tate’s English verse scored as part of the work. No score in Purcell’s hand survives, and the earliest score was copied decades after his death. The music of the prologue, whose words the libretto prints, is lost; so is the music for the scene of the Sorceress and her witches, a chorus and a dance, that the libretto gives after Aeneas’s soliloquy at the end of Act II. Music that later editors have supplied for these gaps is not the unit: the losses are charged on The Imperishable, and the surviving acts are scored on every other axis as they stand, the gap included where it breaks the structure. The earliest documented performance was at Josias Priest’s school in Chelsea; the printed libretto is undated, and whether the work was first made earlier, for the court, is argued, so no date is given and none is rested on. Titles of numbers and phrases of four words or fewer are quoted from Tate’s English; the text is in the work’s own language, and no translation is involved. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date of the Chelsea performance, the identity and dates of the eighteenth-century manuscripts, the keys of the acts, the length of the Lament’s ground and the number of its statements, the voices of the first performance, the details of later reconstructions, the early stage history and the first revivals, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.