Henry Purcell’s 350th birthday prompts the revival of Deborah Warner’s acclaimed 2006 festival production. Warner’s emotionally precise direction and William Christie’s touching musical interpretation enchanted the Vienna audiences and reviewers alike.
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With Dido und Aeneas, Henry Purcell wrote his first and only through-composed opera. It is probable that Purcell created this highly expressive three-act piece for the royal court; however, the first known performance was in 1689 at a girls’ boarding school in Chelsea. This popular Baroque opera is based on a mythological plot drawn from the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Purcell’s intimately orchestrated score, which makes do without brass and percussion, is tight, with forty musical numbers and rapid plot development.

The story focuses on the two protagonists and their multilayered emotional worlds: the Queen of Carthage, Dido, and the Trojan hero Aeneas, who has escaped from his destroyed home-city. Widowed Dido falls in love with Aeneas, thus jeopardising her oath not to marry again; Aeneas is called away by malignant deceit to follow the orders of a spirit he erroneously believes to be Mercury and thus sets sail for Italy. Left behind, Dido dies of a broken heart.

The 350th birthday of Henry Purcell provides the occasion for reviving this successful Wiener Festwochen production of 2006. The concise staging of the opera by Deborah Warner and its musical interpretation by William Christie met with enthusiastic acclaim on the part of both spectators and critics. “The spare, simple manner employed by Warner to sculpt the contrasts between anxious apprehension, the fulfilment of love and the separation of the lovers at the height of their passion is very touching.“ Neue Zürcher Zeitung