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John Bryan, Dido Compar’d, Early Music, Volume 52, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 128–129, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caae008
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Extract
Having reviewed the Purcell Society’s 2021 edition of Dido and Aeneas (‘Dido Restor’d’, Early Music, li/1/ (2023), pp.142–4), edited by Bruce Wood, whose death was sadly announced in December 2023, now another new version sees the light of day. The editor of the Bärenreiter ‘Urtext’ is Robert Shay, whose seminal study, co-authored with Robert Thompson, Purcell manuscripts: the principal musical sources was published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press. The current review will primarily proceed by making comparisons between these two recent editions, identified here by the abbreviations PS (Purcell Society) and B (Bärenreiter).
Shay acknowledges that due to the lack of any surviving autograph materials for Dido and Aeneas it played no substantial part in his earlier study, but that he came to it through directing a university student performance. This experience forced him (as it has done for so many others) to confront the many performance issues with which this opera teases us, mostly raised by the late date of the surviving source materials. His clearly written Preface (in English and German) lays these out, starting with ‘The origins of Dido and Aeneas’. This traces in some detail what is known (and what not) about the performance(s) of the opera in Purcell’s lifetime, carefully summarizing the relationship between the documented performance by ‘Young Gentlewomen’ at ‘Mr Josiah Priest’s Boarding-School at Chelsey’ in 1689 and a putative but undocumented earlier performance at court. Copious footnotes draw on and pay tribute to the work of the many scholars who have debated and variously interpreted the surviving evidence, including references to a number of publications from the past decade which are not specifically referred to in the PS edition.
