Scenes from a rehearsal of ‘Dido and Aeneas’
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Henry Purcell is a celebrated English composer of the baroque era, a man who lived and died in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. The great strains of music that spilt over from the abbey’s organ influenced his score, and when he died in 1695, he was buried adjacent to the organ. In Purcell’s vast repertory, Dido and Aeneas stands as bright as a lighthouse, casting its searching light on Dido, the queen of Carthage and her beloved, the Trojan hero Aeneas. A story of love, duty, betrayal and loss, it is an opera that singers often flock to with Dido’s ‘Lament’ a crowning highlight. The opera is drawn from Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid. Across the world, the opera has had its seasons in the sun and later languished in obscurity for years. Now, the 133-year-old Madras Musical Association and its Chamber Orchestra will perform the opera at the exalted stage of the Museum Theatre, Egmore. But why Purcell, I ask MMA conductor Augustine Paul. “English operas are few. The ones by later composers like Benjamin Britten are complicated. Purcell is the opera star, later followed by Handel. He wrote in English, the latter wrote in Italian. Over the years MMA has performed plenty of songs from the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein. But we have not performed Purcell,” says Augustine.
