Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1688-ish)

Look, I'll admit that English literature has its moments, but when it comes to opera, it's time to face a hard truth: we are getting the shit kicked out of us. Or better to say, I suppose, we have gotten the shit kicked out of us. We got the shit kicked out of us. It is a done deal. Yes, there are still operas being written, and if I had to guess on the basis of no evidence, I'd say that a greater proportion of contemporary operas are in English than in the past, but face it: we're done. Catching up is hopeless. The question of why that should have happened is no doubt multifarious, and not being an expert, I really couldn't even hazard a guess.

Oh well, here's one, and indeed one of the first. As seen here. It's short with a run-time of just an hour, but it's definitely an opera. And it's pretty good! Although actually, sort of hard to talk about. I don't mean this as a negative, though it obviously sounds like one, but nobody in the cast particularly stands out. They don't have the opportunity to, because all the characters--very much including the title duo, and especially Aeneas--really have very small roles. And the relationship between them is seriously nothing; you don't expect a long, detailed depiction of a relationship in an opera, a few arias'll do the trick, but this doesn't even have that; they really barely interact, which necessarily attenuates the emotional content, though I'll admit that her death scene is pretty good. That's okay, though: the music is good and frequently even catchy, and the staging, though somewhat minimalistic, is reasonably striking.

The main thing that may stick with you is that this is a pretty darn strange variation on the original story. As you know, the idea there is that Aeneas leaves Dido because the Gods tell him to and he's just so darned dutiful: he's gotta found Rome; it's his destiny. But here...instead, his leaving is machinated by evil witches, who impersonate Mercury and order him to leave. You wonder: did Purcell think, "man, I can't believe the gods would be such jerks;there has to be another explanation!?" It very much changes the tenor of the story if he just leaves because he's tricked. Very odd.

Regardless, though, it does present a compelling case that opera in English could be more of a thing than it is. I don't know to what extent the libretto here had been updated to be more comprehensible, but there's definitely something about being able to understand the language without the mediation of subtitles. One's so used to watching operas in other languages that it can be kind of jarring watching them in English, but this really works well. I'll try to find some more English operas to watch, maybe.