Output details

Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas

Research content/process:

Dido and Aeneas’s significance as a court masque has been established by the research group led by Professors Andrew Pinnock (University of Southampton) and Bruce Wood (University of Bangor). Scholars have not explored the sonic implications of this discovery, however, and performers have largely chosen to render the work anachronistically as an opera. This project re-located a well-known repertoire piece into the masque tradition from which commercial opera presentations had severed it, and in doing so engaged with the problematic notion of an 'English' sound in seventeenth century vocal and proto-orchestral music. Research questions centred around the use of improvising instruments such as guitars, for whom the music was never notated, as well as dance music, and additions and re-workings for different performance contexts which similarly problematize the notion of Dido as a unified structure. Practice-led research led by Kenny with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment included developing music, for Purcell performances alongside Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage, at the South Bank Centre and on tour in 2008, with three improvising lutes. Approaches to ornamentation were trialled in rehearsal, drawing on the overlap in personnel between players and singers at the Restoration court (ornamentation notated by violinist John Lenton and singer Pietro Reggio were applied), and building on Kenny’s previous research into improvisation and virtuoso singing in Caroline masque performances. Kenny reintroduced French practices that had dominated Restoration musical life, inflecting rhythms and ornaments in a way seldom undertaken or acknowledged by English ensembles. This project also adopted rehearsal and direction methods - with rehearsals directed from the instruments by one theorbo and one harpsichord - that challenge the anachronistic dominance of conductor-led opera.