The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

Performing the Gaps: Dido and Aeneas on Video

Amanda Eubanks Winkler*

1. Introduction

2. Choreographers as directors

3. Varied staging and filming practices

Appendices

Video Examples

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Dido and Aeneas is the most frequently anthologized work by Henry Purcell. Although Dido is atypical for the composer (his theatrical output consists mostly of incidental music for plays and dramatick operas),^[1] for many of our undergraduates it is the one example of Purcell’s music that they will hear. Despite its ubiquity in the classroom, Dido presents numerous pedagogical challenges because there are so many unanswered questions about the opera. Scholarly debates have raged about when and where it was first performed, why it was created, and what it means (see Appendix 1). We do know with absolute certainty that it was performed at Josias Priest’s boarding school in Chelsea, sometime before July 1688 and probably again in 1689, but little about these performances survives beyond a libretto and a printed epilogue. Dido also suffers from an ontological problem. If we believe that the text in the printed Chelsea libretto is an accurate record of performance, no complete musical setting survives; most notably, the prologue, several dances, and the end of Act 2 are missing. Complicating matters, the earliest manuscript source dates from well after Purcell’s death (although Purcell scholars suspect that it was copied from an earlier source).^[2] In addition, no choreographies survive for the dances. What we call Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas—the work that is endlessly performed and anthologized today—is therefore incomplete. Thus, a historically accurate performance cannot be mounted. But can one ever?^[3]

1.2 Showing different performances of a single work in the classroom demonstrates to students that music, as Christopher Small puts it, “is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do.”^[4] Furthermore, in working with video materials, we should resist the temptation to deem “some director’s staging … revelatory when it corresponds to one’s own or some historically sanctioned reading of the work, but ill-conceived or offbeat when failing to do so.”^[5] In other words, there can be no absolute “right way” to perform Dido. Even if a complete score had survived, as Bruce Haynes argues in The End of Early Music, Baroque notation is like shorthand: it is “thin” writing, and the performer was expected to flesh it out.^[6] For obvious reasons, this is particularly true of a piece such as Dido, which is filled with gaps. In what follows, I will consider four performances (all readily available on video: see Appendix 2) that fill in the lacunae in different ways.^[7] Each one illuminates a different facet of that slippery beast Dido and Aeneas, and each, in my experience, can provoke lively discussion among students.

2. Choreographers as directors

2.1 Because of the significant role dance plays in Dido, the opera has appealed to choreographer-directors, although they give dance a centrality beyond what the librettist or composer could have envisioned. The first production I’ll consider, choreographer Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas, uses mimetic movements that are closely aligned with Purcell’s musical language and Tate’s libretto.^[8] Yet in Morris’s production the singers—those making the music—are quite literally relegated to the margins. When I saw this production in Ann Arbor in the mid-nineties, the singers were placed in the pit with the orchestra, and in the video recording they are frequently heard but not seen. Despite the shift of focus towards matters terpsichorean, Morris’s Dido raises interesting issues for music history students, but it does not work equally well in all contexts: this production can be rather confusing for undergraduates viewing the work for the first time. Besides the generic confusion produced by Dido’s balletic reinvention, Morris takes both the role of Dido and that of the Sorceress. Early in my teaching career, I made the mistake of using this video in an introductory survey course without sufficiently preparing the students. As one freshman exclaimed, “Dido’s a dude!” Needless to say, it was difficult to get things back on track after that.

2.2 This production does, however, work quite well in a course on music and gender (or music and sexuality) where students have already been thinking and reading about these issues; I’ve successfully used it in the Music and Gender course I teach at Syracuse University. Morris has an androgynous appearance, for he sports long hair, lipstick, earrings, gold nail polish, and a dress cut to show off his decidedly muscular physique. His liminally gendered performance functions in varied ways. His Dido is not meant to be parodic or grotesque in the manner of some cross-dressed roles in early modern England (e.g., the Nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or Mopsa in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen). His portrayal of the Queen of Carthage is serious, the weight of her dilemma signaled by the gestural language. For instance, Morris foregrounds the queen’s emotional distress in “Ah, Belinda”: on the text “I am pressed with torment” he presses his hands to his breast before doing a plié in second position, then moves his hands downwards, suggesting unfulfilled desire.^[9] Dido also possesses a restrained dignity, as Morris uses classically inspired poses channeled through the language of Nijinskian modern dance. Beginning on the text “peace and I are strangers grown,” Morris replicates imagery found on Grecian urns as he holds his arms angularly, turning his face to the side as he mostly moves in a flat plane (Video 1).

2.3 On the other hand, Morris as the Sorceress uses a choreographic language inflected by camp exaggeration and ungainly gestures, causing us to read the in-between-ness of his dancing body in a different way. During the opening lines of “Wayward Sisters,” he bonelessly rolls around a centrally placed bench, then imitates the movements of a raven’s flapping wings before beating his hand on the floor. On the text “ere sunset will most wretched prove” Morris parodically incorporates elements of Dido’s gestural language—the plié in second position turned into a near crouch followed by a grotesque mockery of Dido’s classicizing flat plane choreography. The Sorceress and her coven then twitch gleefully as they cackle at the prospect of Dido’s destruction (Video 2). Playing Dido’s and the Sorceress’s scenes back-to-back can open up a productive consideration of Roger Savage’s notion of the Sorceress as Dido’s “destructive anti-self” or the relationship between the two characters more generally.^[10]

2.4 Another danced version of the opera is available on video: Sasha Waltz’s Dido and Aeneas, a “choreographic opera” (her term). In Waltz’s production the singing cast and the dancing cast are not spatially separated, and the singers sometimes participate in the choreography, with varying degrees of success.^[11] Waltz’s gestural language is fluid—a fluidity that is established at the very beginning of the opera as the dancers cavort about in a tank of water, a spectacle meant to represent the voyage to Carthage. The prologue is partially sung in this version, as music director Attilio Cremonesi supplies the missing music from other works by Purcell. Indeed, on the DVD slipcover, Cremonesi is credited with “musical reconstruction.” This restoration project is so expansive that the length of the opera balloons from the typical 50–55 minutes to 98 minutes.

2.5 This video can provide a point of departure for examining the way certain performing traditions become codified, even canonical. Cremonesi expands Dido’s “Ah, Belinda” by using an instrumental air from Purcell’s Bonduca as a postlude (Video 3). This extended version of “Ah, Belinda” was used again four years later in an audio recording featuring Sarah Connolly as Dido.^[12]

3. Varied staging and filming practices

3.1 One video incorporates elements of Baroque staging practices and can spark a valuable discussion with students about how historical information might inspire performers. The production of Dido and Aeneas directed by Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubek, with musical direction by Vincent Dumestre, incorporates some elements of Baroque gesture and dance and also follows a specific period casting tradition.^[13] In 1700 Dido and Aeneas was interpolated into Charles Gildon’s revised version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and a promptbook survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library that indicates that the role of the Sorceress was taken by a Mr. Wiltshire.^[14] A contemporary song sheet associated with this Measure for Measure also lists Wiltshire as the performer of “Come away, fellow sailors.” Roussat and Lubek’s production of Dido replicates this performance tradition, as a man sings the role of the Sorceress and also takes the sailor’s role (in disguise) at the beginning of Act 3. Students will particularly appreciate the Sorceress’s antics in Act 2, where she appears as a giant octopus (a possible nod to Ursula the Sea Witch in Disney’s Little Mermaid). Not surprisingly, her cackling companions are malevolent mermaids (Video 4). While this production is historically informed in some respects, it obviously does not try to recreate a seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century theatrical experience, for, in addition to a massive cephalopod, it also incorporates a troupe of acrobats who take dancing roles, most notably as grotesque Hieronymous Bosch insects and agile sailors. Although the London stage featured rope dancers and acrobats in the Baroque period, they weren’t doing Cirque de Soleil style tricks.

3.2 Admittedly, these three productions may not be appropriate for a student learning about Dido for the first time in an introductory survey course. Another widely available video may be more fitting: Peter Maniura’s Dido and Aeneas. It takes a typical opera-on-film approach (à la Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous productions of La Traviata and Otello). Playing Maniura’s film version might launch a conversation about the differences between staged opera and opera as a cinematic experience. This Dido, featuring Maria Ewing as the Queen of Carthage, was filmed at Hampton Court House, across the street from the famous Palace. It demonstrates the powerful visual tools the director has at his or her disposal when committing opera to film. For instance, as Dido’s companion sings “Oft she visits,” the director cuts away to show us what she is singing about—although here Aeneas’s hunting trip is conflated with Actaeon’s deadly excursion, amplifying the sense of impending doom (Video 5).

3.3 Playing any of these videos in the classroom produces a certain tension between the seventeenth-century Dido and Aeneas—or our imagined version of the opera—and the twentieth- or twenty-first-century Dido and Aeneas. As a colleague of mine recently observed, when using video in the classroom, we sometimes end up talking more about the visual components (set design, blocking, costuming, camera angles, staging, choreography) than the musical ones. But opera is not just a musical affair; it is meant to be a feast for the ears and the eyes. Whatever the perils and pleasures, using video in the classroom can allow students to experience these works as an activity, as something people do, rather than as notes on a page or as disembodied sounds transmitted via earbuds.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Scholarly debates on the origin and meaning of Dido and Aeneas

Appendix 2. Dido and Aeneas on DVD

Video Examples

Video 1. Act 1, “Ah, Belinda”; Mark Morris, choreographer, as Dido

Video 2. Act 2, scene 1, “Wayward Sisters”; Mark Morris, choreographer, as Sorceress

Video 3. Act 1, “Ah Belinda,” expanded by music director Attilio Cremonesi; Sasha Waltz, choreographer

Video 4. Act 2, scene 1, “Wayward Sisters,” Sorceress as octopus; Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubek, directors

Video 5. Act 2, scene 2, “Oft she visits”; Peter Maniura, director