Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas

This book reimagines Dido and Aeneas as a dynamic site of cultural memory, tracing how topoi evolve through changing performance traditions and representational techniques. Moving beyond the static frameworks of structuralist music semiotics, Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas examines how writers, directors, musicians, actors and audiences have reshaped Dido’s meaning across historical, social and aesthetic boundaries. Drawing on a rich array of stagings, from Purcell and Tate’s première to contemporary reinterpretations, the book maps how recurring themes (topoi) are inflected by shifting tropoi—alterations in ideology, genre, gesture and style. This study offers a new approach to operatic meaning-making, revealing how Dido’s lament continues to be significant precisely because it is never the same. Engaging cultural critique, literary theory, musicology, performance studies and semiotics, Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas provides a detailed analysis of the opera’s thematic topoi and their reinterpretations over time—of relevance to anyone interested in how opera remembers and reinvents the past.