Teatru Manoel’s recent production of Dido and Aeneas, brought to the stage between February 23 and 27, is certainly a worthy homage to what could be considered the first English opera. It revealed itself to be an unpretentious and occasionally masterful iteration.
With music by Henry Purcell and a libretto by Nahum Tate, the opera has enthused audiences for over three centuries. The version brought to the stage at the Manoel retains the opera’s original sprit while also infusing it with contemporaneity, particularly through costume and set design, and surely in no small part due to the vision of the director, Denise Mulholland.
The brevity of the opera forces every aspect of it to arise from necessity. This could have easily resulted in a production all too familiar, but instead the audience often found itself surprised, be it due to an unexpected image appearing on the drapery, or a chorus sprouting out of vacant theatre boxes. Everything is laid to the scrutiny of the instant, and the cast is expected to fit the bill.
Francesca Buhagiar as Dido sang the opera’s famous Lament with dignified simplicity – an expert rendition of what could be Purcell’s best aria. Aeneas, played by Cliff Zammit Stevens, is equally compelling, managing despite the constraints of the libretto and the brevity of the opera to imbue a certain complexity of emotions to his character.
The voices of Belinda, played by Nadia Vella, and of the Second Woman, played by Alison Gatt, maintained a ubiquitous subtle presence throughout the opera. The Sorceress, played by Cathy Lawlor, and her coven of witches, played by Francesca Aquilina and Analise Mifsud, inhabited convincingly the realm of the supernatural, aided in part by Luke Azzopardi’s enchanting costume design.
Azzopardi’s costumes are in keeping with the spirit of baroque extravagance, taking full force in Dido and the Sorceress, while the rather simple set design by Andrew Borg Wirth was tastefully inconspicuous. Each dressed the baroque with a temperateness that allowed the audience to engage with the opera and not be distracted from the story.
Conducted by Mro Marco Mencoboni, Purcell’s music and Tate’s verses find full accord. Performed by the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, the rendition was a pure delight. It is safe to say they carried the opera to enormous heights and were the crux of the whole production.
The plot of Dido and Aeneas is taken from Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, however, there are some stark differences between this, and Purcell and Tate’s telling of the Dido myth. Indeed, the opera is a creative interpretation of Virgil’s epic, as was a common baroque practice at the time.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate
In Virgil’s epic, Aeneas departs from Troy with a band of followers with the intention of founding a new state in Italy.
They eventually reach Carthage where Aeneas ingratiates himself with the widowed queen Dido, who had taken on a vow of chastity following her husband’s death. Falling in love with Aeneas, she fears that this compromises her faithfulness to her dead husband, and she remains unconvinced that Aeneas would remain faithful to her.
The gods decide to intervene. Juno conjures a storm during a hunting party so that the couple could take shelter in a cave and Dido may succumb to her lover’s charms. Jove, however, disapproves of the union, and so sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his task of founding Rome.
Aeneas is not pleased but nevertheless makes preparations to leave. However, he puts off telling Dido of his impending departure. She eventually finds out and pleads with him to stay but is unsuccessful.
After he leaves, she issues a curse: “Let there be no love or treaties between our peoples”. (This is said to be Virgil’s poetic explanation for the Punic Wars.) She then thrusts Aeneas’s sword through her heart and dies.
Tate’s libretto makes several changes from Virgil. The most marked difference is that he replaces the goddesses for witches who plot the fall of Dido, planning this to take place in a darkened cave. The hunt takes place and the party hurry back to town when the storm hits. Aeneas is stopped by a false vision of Mercury conjured by the witches who tells him that Jove commands him to leave Dido and return to restore Troy. With little resistance, Aeneas accepts this command.
Dido and Aeneas argue considerably about this and Aeneas finally agrees to stay, but Dido refuses to deal with him further. She sends him away and does not take her own life as in Virgil’s epic. In Purcell’s opera, rather, she dies of grief.
We are told from Tate’s 1689 libretto that the opera was originally intended to be performed at a girls’ school in London “by Young Gentlewomen”, which perhaps explains some of the changes in plot. In Tate’s rendition, Dido pays the price of her ill-conceived indiscretion of falling in love with Aeneas and is penalised exorbitantly: “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate”.
Indeed, the scholar Roger Savage describes the opera as presenting “a woman’s destruction by worldly experience”, no doubt to discourage this in the “Young Gentlewoman” for whom this opera was conceived.
Savage goes on to note that Virgil’s Aeneas “needs to be rescued from the good gods from his Carthaginian enchantress” as she represents “Rome’s traditional enemy across the Mediterranean”. Purcell and Tate’s Aeneas, rather, is deceived by the Sorceress and her coven “into thinking that Love and Empire are irreconcilable”.
Deception is indeed the running theme of Dido and Aeneas, and the opera is a reminder of the need to be vigilant against forces of deceit running amok across every age of the human story.