*Amanda Eubanks Winkler (awinkler@syr.edu) is Associate Professor of Music History and Cultures at Syracuse University. Her research and performance activities focus on English theater music, and she has published articles on topics ranging from seventeenth-century didactic masques to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. She is the author of the book O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Indiana University Press, 2006); two editions of Restoration-era theater music; and, with Linda Austern and Candace Bailey, an essay collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Indiana University Press, 2017). She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the NEH and the AHRC (UK) to support her research.
[1] John Dryden coined the term “dramatick opera,” using it in his word-book for Purcell’s King Arthur: King Arthur, or, The British Worthy, a Dramatick Opera (London: Jacob Tonson, 1691). Purcell scholars now prefer this designation to “semi opera” when referring to the late seventeenth-century English operatic form that combined spoken dialogue, music, and lavish spectacle.
[2] This is GB-Ob MS Tenbury 1266. For a discussion of the manuscript sources for Dido, see Robert Shay and Robert Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 232–34.
[3] See my critique of historical accuracy and authenticity as evaluative benchmarks in “A Tale of Twelfth Night: Music, Performance, and the Pursuit of Authenticity,” Shakespeare Bulletin 36, no. 2 (forthcoming in 2018).
[4] Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 2.
[5] Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 509.
[6] Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performers’ History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.
[7] Sadly, Deborah Warner and William Christie’s production, featuring unruly schoolgirl dancers, has gone out of print; nevertheless, it is available in many academic libraries. A few excerpts from the production can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbU4sV5p7Xo.
[8] For an excellent analysis of Morris’s gestural language and its relationship to Tate’s words and Purcell’s score, see Rachel Duerden and Bonnie Rowell, “Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas (1989): A Critical Postmodern Sensibility,” Dance Chronicle 36, no. 2 (2013): 143–71.
[9] As described by Duerden and Rowell in “Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas,” 145.
[10] Roger Savage, “Producing Dido and Aeneas: An Investigation into Sixteen Problems,” Early Music 4, no. 4 (1976): 404. One might also use Judith Peraino’s exploration of their relationship in “I Am an Opera: Identifying with Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas,” in En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 99–131.
[11] Wayne McGregor adopts a similar staging approach in his Royal Opera House / Royal Ballet production of 2009; see my review in the Journal of Seventeeth-Century Music 16, no. 1 (2010), https://sscm-jscm.org/v16/no1/rr_winkler.html.
[12] Henry Purcell, Dido & Aeneas, Orchestra and Chorus of the Age of Enlightenment, directed by Steven Devine and Elizabeth Kenny, Chandos Records: CHAN 0757, 2009, compact disc.
[13] Le Poème Harmonique, the Baroque orchestra for this production, directed by Dumestre, is known for its work with the stage director Benjamin Lazar, who engages with Baroque staging conventions—e.g.., their candlelit Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière and Lully, available on DVD (Alpha Productions, 2005).
[14] The DVD notes written by Dumestre, and numerous reviewers of this DVD (following his lead), give the incorrect date of 1706 for the promptbook. On the Folger promptbook, see Curtis Price and Irene Cholij, “Dido’s Bass Sorceress,” The Musical Times 127, no. 1726 (1986): 615–18. Roles such as Hecate were often played by men on the Restoration stage; see Amanda Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 18–62.
