Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas
Ellen T. Harris
Abstract
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet the work remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the accuracy of the surviving scores cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris provides a detailed consideration of the many theories that have been proposed for the opera’s origin and chronology. She re-evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer and examines the work’s historical position in Restorati ... More
Keywords: Libretto, Chronology, Allegory, Sources, Formal structure, Harmonic patterns, Text setting, Declamation, Ground bass, Performance history
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 | Print ISBN-13: 9780190271664 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2017 | DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190271664.001.0001 |
