I get to about half of the BCS Come and Sing events (there’s one every year, invariably sold out). I made a point of getting to this year’s, on most of the choruses from Dido and Aeneas. I’ve never performed this work, apart from a concert in Birmingham years ago which included a couple of these choruses. I’ve been to a few performances though, most recently just before I started this blog. I’m told that a recent staging in St Petersburg was a sell-out, though I think the amount of flesh on view in that production may have had something to do with it.
With a score in my hands I was able to study the history of Dido in a bit more detail. I hadn’t realised that some of the music is missing (we know because we have the complete libretto), explaining a feature which as a classicist I am bound to notice: the absence of the gods. Phoebus and Venus appear in a masque which originally began the work, but was not used in the abridgements which are our source for the music. The odd postlude which I heard at the end of the last performance I went to does in fact go back to the first performances of the piece. It’s dated more than the rest, though! And what about the girls’ school this was written for? Thinking of my own (all-girls) school, I found this hard to believe – but it turns out the school was run by a dancing-master with theatre connections, more like the equivalent of the Royal Ballet School or even RADA or at least the spare-time performing arts coaching which flourishes today. In which case the description of it as a school for young gentlewomen might have been talking it up, socially speaking; these girls were being trained to appear in the theatre in a year or two. Actually come to think of it my school too has produced some notable actresses.
We worked on the choruses during the day, including getting our witches and drunken sailors to sound convincing, and gave a cut-down performance with soloists and piano accompaniment at the end of the afternoon.