About this edition
Composed around 1689, Dido and Aeneas stands as Henry Purcell's only true opera and one of the earliest masterworks of English musical theater. Drawn from Virgil's Aeneid and shaped by Purcell's genius for expressive vocal writing, the opera compresses a tragic tale of love and abandonment into barely an hour of music, culminating in Dido's celebrated lament, "When I am laid in earth" — one of the most poignant arias in the entire operatic repertoire. Despite its modest original forces, the work's emotional depth and formal economy have secured its place as a cornerstone of the Baroque stage.
This full score reproduces the text established in The Works of Henry Purcell, Volume III, published by Novello, Ewer & Co. in London in 1889 as part of the Purcell Society's landmark collected edition of the composer's music. Edited by the English musicologist and tenor William Hayman Cummings, this volume represented one of the first serious attempts to establish a scholarly, historically grounded text for Dido and Aeneas, drawing on surviving manuscript sources to clarify the opera for performance. Cummings's edition became a standard reference for conductors, scholars, and performers for generations, and it remains a valuable window into the earliest critical engagement with Purcell's music.
About this edition:
- Full orchestral score
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a historic public domain edition
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
We're glad to bring this historic public domain score back into print, making Purcell's Dido and Aeneas readily accessible to conductors, orchestral musicians, students, and scholars alike.
