Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Early Music Show
Episode: Purcell's Dido
Description: Lucie Skeaping presents a profile of one of the earliest and best-known English operas - Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas", the love story of the Queen of Carthage and her Trojan hero. Set to a libretto by Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas was first performed in Chelsea in July 1688, and although it wasn't staged again in the composer's lifetime, it received a brief revival in 1700 and then disappeared completely as a staged work, with only sporadic concert performances until 1895 when the first staged version in modern times was performed by students of the Royal College of Music at London's Lyceum...