Madras Musical Association brings Henry Purcell’s baroque opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ to Chennai

Henry Purcell is a celebrated English composer of the baroque era, a man who lived and died in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. The great strains of music that spilt over from the abbey’s organ influenced his score, and when he died in 1695, he was buried adjacent to the organ.

In Purcell’s vast repertory, Dido and Aeneas stands as bright as a lighthouse, casting its searching light on Dido, the queen of Carthage and her beloved, the Trojan hero Aeneas. A story of love, duty, betrayal and loss, it is an opera that singers often flock to with Dido’s ‘Lament’ a crowning highlight. The opera is drawn from Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid . Across the world, the opera has had its seasons in the sun and later languished in obscurity for years.