hello, i must be going
by Douglas Messerli
Nahum Tate
(libretto), Henry Purcell (music) Dido
and Aeneas / LAOpera, Los Angeles, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the
production I attended was a matinee on November 2, 2014
Henry
Purcell’s lovely Baroque opera, first performed in the summer of 1688, was
probably part of the annual spring celebrations at Priest’s boarding school for
women. The work represents Purcell’s only “traditional” opera—if we define the
tradition to be the kind uninterrupted musical theater that developed later
through Handel, and the dominant forms of the genre in the 18th and
19th centuries. Certainly, after Dido
and Aeneas Purcell did not abandon writing for theater, but the musical
forms he worked in were so-called “semi-operas,” music mixed with speech.
After seeing an high-definition, live
broadcast of the Met’s Bizet’s Les
troyens just last year, in which the relationship between Dido and Aeneas played out over the last two long acts of the
work, during which, much of the time, the two languidly lay, embracing upon a
huge, multi-pillowed bed, the LAOpera production, based on the Frankfurt Opera
version directed by Barrie Kosky, seems so-attenuated in its hour of
performance time, that we hardly get a chance to actually realize that the two
have consummated their sudden love before the hero, most emphatically, trots
back to Italy, slamming the door behind him, a bit like Ibsen’s Nora. 
Indeed, everything in Purcell’s representation
of the tragic romance is theatrically played out before the entire court,
within the kind of frontal friezes that that might remind one more of gestural
early human-scapes of Boris Godunov
than a jaunt into the local countryside Tate’s libretto calls for. Indeed, the first
scenes are played out in this version of the Purcell work on a long bench upon
which the entire cast is seated beside Dido (Paula Murrihy) as she cries out in
her suffering for her desires to embrace of the new conqueror, Aeneas (Liam
Bonner). No sooner has the beautiful Carthaginian queen declared that “Peace
and I are strangers grown,” than her maid Belinda (Kateryna Kasper) reassures
her that Aeneas shares her passion and agitates for a marriage between the two
royals, despite Dido’s reservations. And almost as quickly as she and others
have joined in their court-wide blessing, all rush to hill and dale to celebrate—with
the Kosky production suggesting in the secondaries’ behavior and—at least in
two cases—their in-the-buff attire, wilder goings-on than that original young boarding
school girls might have ever imagined. Although Purcell’s opera makes little
to-do about the Dido-Aeneas romance—a brief scene of flirtation and a couple of
short kisses representing their formal introduction to each other—we surely
recognize that something far more serious has occurred between the two lovers
than a simple sharing of a picnic and hunt. 
Even these seemingly uneventful
festivities, however, are quickly interrupted by distant thunder, the sound of
which is first picked up with the already suspicious Dido, who, along with
Belinda, encourages the entire court to scurry back to the castle (“Haste,
haste to town.”). Dido might well fear for those claps of thunder, for, as we
already have been shown, through the meeting of the Sorceress and her two witchy
comrades within a nearly cave (the marvelously comic trio of the large-framed
Black countertenors John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor), evil
plans are being hatched to destroy the Queen and her city both; and soon after,
Aeneas is accosted by Mercury’s spirit demanding that he return, as he promised
Jove, to rebuild Troy.
As attractive as Aeneas may appear to both
Dido and the audience, he is clearly dunderhead when it comes to love, worrying
more about how we find the words to explain his decision to choose duty over
his just-consumed relationship. That other great African explorer, Captain
Spaulding of the Marx Brothers’ Animal
Crackers assertively proclaimed
the sentiment now so perplexing the young Aeneas in the Kalmar-Ruby song, “Hello,
I Must Be Going.” Margaret Dumont, however, was no Dido; and Aeneas surely
realizes that his leaving can only end in her death. Accordingly, despite the
fact that she has heard the rumors of the Trojan men preparing to weigh anchor
(“Come away, fellow soldiers”), Aeneas attempts to placate the queen by lying.
Dido reacts with scorn to his hypocritical
declaration that he has decided to remain, declaring that even having thought
of leaving her has already betrayed her—as indeed he has! Given her insistence
that he now leave her, Kosky’s Aeneas, as I have suggested, plays it almost comically,
rushing off just as abruptly as he has previously arrived in Dido’s court.
There has indeed been something about his
speedy comings and goings that, along with the abbreviated story the opera tells,
Tate’s plot dooms any fruition of the sentiment that its characters might have
felt. And in that sense, Purcell’s tuneful garden-party-like opera suddenly
becomes something far-more dangerous and threatening, as if its central
character has not only been frightened by a clap of thunder but by the specter
of a snake swallowing its own tail.
And so, quite naturally, Purcell’s work
end as it begin, with Dido singing of her fears upon her long bench-like
throne. But this time she is not accompanied by the entire court, but stands
and sits alone, singing now not just her doubts, but regrets, which gradually
converge into a dirge for her own death, “When I am laid in Earth.”
Despite the seeming lightness of Purcell’s
work, which doubtlessly led Kosky to wrap his production within so many
comic-like moments—and apart from the sometimes comic-book-like series of
friezes with which the composer and his librettist encapsulate the abbreviated
adventures of their heroes—the opera, finally, is transformed from a display of
vernal gavottes into a dance of death.
Purcell’s music beautifully reveals this
transformation, gently shifting throughout the last scene from fury, to pain
and sorrow, and, finally, to silence and death. Unfortunately, Kosky, evidently
unable to figure out a way to help his Dido attain the same shifts in character
as she fluctuates between these emotions, forces Murrihy to cry out in spasms
of what is evidently meant to represent internal pain, turning the final tragic
moments of Purcell’s work into a kind grand Guignol-like travesty as utters what
first might appear to be sobs that turn into gurgles of vomiturition In the
beginning, these simply make the audience a bit uncomfortable, but they finally
leave us with a deep sense of embarrassment at the very moment when tears might
instead be welling up beneath our eyes. As a young man standing near me intoned
to his friend during the intermission: “I thought she’d never die!”
I’ll
forgive such an overall graceful production, however, that rather serious flaw.
And Purcell’s music, under the direction of Steven Sloane, stood up to the
test, charming every one of us again.
Los Angeles, November
3, 2014
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