Opera Lafayette Breathes New Life Into Dido and Aeneas
Henry Purcell’s Baroque tragedy opens Opera Lafayette’s season under new artistic director Patrick Dupre Quigley.
“It’s a great first opera,” Patrick Dupre Quigley says of Dido and Aeneas, currently in the midst of its Opera Lafayette debut. “And it’s an opera that has survived in reasonably constant performance since it was first done in the 17th century.”
The English Baroque work, composed by Henry Purcell with a libretto by Nahum Tate, runs a brisk, intermissionless 65 minutes. “It has one of the most well-known English-language arias of all time,” Quigley notes.
That aria — “When I Am Laid in Earth” — is sung by Dido over “what we call a ground bass, which means it’s basically a bassline that repeats over and over and over again, and different music is placed on top of it for the three and a half minutes of the aria,” Quigley says.
At Opera Lafayette, the aria is performed by soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, whom Quigley calls “one of the great stars of the world of American opera.”
Set in an all-girls’ school, the opera is based on a story from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid.
“Dido, Queen of Carthage, receives the wandering Trojan Prince Aeneas into her court and they fall in love,” explains Quigley. “But in this version of the story — the version from late 17th-century England — an evil malevolent sorceress causes Aeneas to believe that he’s being called on to continue his searches to restore ruined Troy.
“Dido is crushed by this. After falling in love and having a brief moment of happiness and fulfillment, she builds her own funeral pyre and commits suicide upon it. So it starts light and ends up pretty heavy.”
Elijah McCormack, who is transgender, plays Aeneas, and, says Quigley, “he’s marvelous. It’s an incredibly powerful performance.” McCormack sings the role as a male soprano.
“The role of Aeneas is usually sung by a high baritone or low tenor,” Quigley explains. “But we decided that we would try to do it the way it was done originally. So all of the parts — except for one, the sorceress [bass-baritone Hans Tashjian] — are being sung by high voices.”
Dido and Aeneas marks Quigley’s first production as Opera Lafayette’s new artistic director, succeeding founder Ryan Brown.
“I have been the artistic director designate for the past two years,” he says. “So I’ve been able to do some planning and be familiar with the organization. And in opera, nothing gets done overnight.” His inaugural season will continue with Queen of Hearts in February and New Woman in April.
“We primarily work with music from the 17th to the 19th centuries,” he says of the 30-year-old company. “And the hallmark of all of our performances is that our orchestra is made up of musicians who play on period instruments that are either from or copies of the instruments that they used to play in the 17th or 18th century. The violin played in the modern symphony orchestra is not the same instrument as the one played at the time that Henry Purcell or Mozart or Beethoven wrote their music.
“So it is a sound that is very rich,” he continues, “but also has a directness. It’s warm. The sound was not designed for such large rooms as a 2,000-seat hall. It was made to be experienced in a much more intimate setting. And most of the productions that we put on are considerably more intimate than what the Metropolitan Opera is doing. You can see people’s faces, you’re sitting closer, you have a more direct connection with both the singer and the orchestra.”
Dido and Aeneas will be performed in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Oct. 18, at 7:30 p.m. at Sixth & I, 600 I St. NW. The New York City performance follows on Monday, Oct. 20, at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, also at 7:30 p.m. For tickets, visit operalafayette.org/dido.
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