Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

Ellen T Harris

Oxford University Press ISBN: 978-019-027167-1 256pp (pb) £29.99 rrp Thirty years after publishing her invaluable study of Purcell’s landmark opera, Ellen T Harris returns to the subject for a revision. In some respects the picture is more complicated, with fresh yet inconclusive sidelights on the nub of the ‘Dido’ conundrum: when, why and for whom was it written? Harris sifts the competing hypotheses with forensic calm, having first located Tate’s libretto within the context of 17th-century English theatre, summarising allegorical possibilities en route. Her textual attentiveness takes nothing for granted and relishes the piquant aside – a chapter on the music cites Thomas Arne’s observation that many of Purcell’s songs were ‘infamously bad… the object of sneers and ridicule’.

For the general reader the finale section given over to performance history will be the most accessible, but then accessibility is rarely an issue in this absorbing immersion in an everelusive opera. Paul Riley ★★★★