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Dating Purcell's Dido and Aeneas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1967
Extract
Although Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera which most people remember today, it is wrong to think that it was the first operatic work to be seen in London. That honour belongs to a through-composed French work, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus. This opera was performed only once, and that was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 30 March 1674. The music was the work of the French composer, Louis Grabu, who at that time was attached to the English court as Composer of the King's Musick. Then, about the same period, two English operas were seen at The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden. One was a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the other was Psyche by Thomas Shadwell, but both of these pieces included spoken dialogue and do not concern us here. But a decade later, in 1685, the through-composed opera by Dryden and Grabu, Albion and Albanius, was given six performances at The Duke's Theatre. So it was Ariane and this work that were the predecessors of Purcell's opera.
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- Copyright © 1968 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors
References
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