Dido and Aeneas. Virgilian influence on Henry Purcell

Abstract

The Aeneid by Virgil has been admired and continually imitated along centuries, and it is one of the most important poems written in the history of western civilization after the Bible, as it served as a source of influence for many other poets and prose writers, including Henry Purcell. This paper examines how the adjustments made by Nahum Tate, the librettist of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas ‒performed in 1689‒, which, according to the title, the argument is based on the love story between the protagonist of the Aeneid by Virgil and the Queen of Carthage, underwent extremely significant changes in the characterization and motivation of its main characters. In this way, the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that these changes, instead of two, lead to the description of four different protagonists: two Dido’s and two Aeneas’. Besides, despite the fact that the relevance of the Aeneid is irrefutable in the composition of the libretto, Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689) derives directly not only from the Virgilian text. Indeed, the script suffered a significant series of changes due to the influence of many Medieval and Renaissance authors, especially Dante Alighieri and John Milton. For that reason, this essay considers the implications of the transmission of Virgilian influence on writers from the Middle Ages. The new portrayal of the main protagonists ‒Dido and Aeneas‒ pointed out by the Alighieri and Milton in their works served as a reference for the librettist, as reflected in the symbolic changes made on the script. Accordingly, the motivation for taking into consideration these two author’s influence to the opera is the perception of the characteristics that Aeneas and Dido and the main characters of the Comedy ‒Dante, Beatrice, Virgil‒ and Paradise Lost ‒Adam, Eve, Satan‒ have in common.