The character of Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, to a libretto by Nahum Tate, has
been a puzzle to modern interpreters. Apparently inconsolable and totally confused in
love, she seems a harpy or worse - while she commits suicide upon learning of Aeneas’s
apparent betrayal, she has already been putting him off for the entire opera.
Interpretations of this conundrum have been many and varied, even going so far as to
posit that, in some Freudian sense, Dido IS the sorceress out to destroy her own
happiness.
I think that, like the purloined letter, the explanation for Dido’s very strange behavior is
right under our noses. The libretto itself, properly read, provides the entire explanation.
Why does Dido appeal to “Fate, to Earth and Heaven” before Aeneas informs her he’s
leaving? Why does she refer to her “wrongs” when asking us to remember her but to
forget her fate? The answers lie in the frankness of the libretto, and in its intended
audience.
We have both Aeneas’s and the witches’ word that there has indeed been sex between
Dido and Aeneas. When he realizes he must leave Dido (who, contrary to common
belief, he really loves), Aeneas asks of his “injur’d Queen”:
How can so hard a fate be took?
One night enjoy’d, the next forsook.
The witches are a little more blunt:
Elissa’s ruined! Elissa’s ruined!
As there is no particular reason to deny this evidence, the question is: when did this
happen? There’s no place in the classical “day” that it could have; the outdoor scene
which was clearly arranged to officially encourage royal love is ruined by the witches
(who make a very big point of “conjuring up a storm to mar their royal sport”) just as
Aeneas returns successful from the day’s hunt, at the only likely point when everyone
might go their own way for a while. This leads to only one conclusion: the sexual
activity takes place before the opera begins.
Now everything is clear. Dido has given herself to Aeneas, but has not been moved. He
is the answer to a girl’s prayer, even a queen’s, but she happens not to enjoy his
company, and thus is doomed by Fate - either he will leave her, which would be a
catastrophe, or he will stay, which would not be much better. So we first meet her
lamenting the choice to sleep with him:
Ah Belinda, I am press’d
With torment not to be confess’d.
Peace and I are strangers grown,
I languish till my grief is known,
Yet would not, would not, have it guess’d.
To be sure!
She then launches into a sarcastic denunciation of this perfect man, the Trojan “guest”:
Whence did so much virtue spring?
What storms, what battles did he sing?
Anchises’ valor mix’d with Venus’s charms,
How soft in peace, and yet how fierce in arms!
Belinda understands something is dreadfully wrong; despite the arrival of the answer to
all the prayers of a lonely, widowed, queen, and asks why his story “Might melt the
rocks, as well as you.” The answer is all too clear; having given herself to this perfect
man, Dido has discovered that she does not love him and her fate is thus sealed. When
Aeneas appears to ask when he might “be blessed with cares of love and state distress’d”
she immediately answers that “Fate forbids what you pursue.” Why? Because she
already knows in her heart.
Now it’s clear why the witches’ plot is so evil, since Aeneas’s departure seals Dido’s fate
right away. He is often portrayed as the stereotypical flighty man, but there is nothing in
what he says that indicates any such thing. He’s sold on Dido, if not the other way
around, to the extent that he even offers to betray Zeus’s command to stay with her.
However, with her fate sealed in either case, Dido decides that it’s enough that he “once
had the thought of leaving” her.
We now understand her motivation, but what about that of Purcell and Josiah Priest, the
choreographer who ordered up this show for his lady students? Again, the message is
very clear - even a queen can get into horrible trouble by fooling around. In an era of
great freedoms, with the king’s mistress Nell Gwynne traipsing about in public and in the
theater, it’s quite easy to imagine that well-born girls would not be easily convinced to
guard their virtue. But by showing that even someone with absolutely nothing to lose, a
queen, a widow, faced with a thoroughly acceptable and appetizing man, might still seal
her own fate by this bad choice, the teachers would have a profound lesson indeed for
their bright, unrestrained, charges.
Now the last scene finally makes sense as well. Dido bemoans her fate and her choices -
May my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast,
Remember me, but ah, forget my fate!
and the Cupids “scatter roses on her tomb, soft and gentle as her heart” - not the usual
picture we have of Dido. But totally consistent in itself, and in line with how Baroque
opera uses royal and mythological beings to illustrate the kind of thing which has now
moved to popular culture, as well as with the Baroque practice of ending secular cantatas
with “up-to-date” advice to the lovelorn, in the final recitative and aria.
Case closed.
Comments