Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas made its first appearance at the Los Angeles Opera on 25 October 2014.  We say “Purcell,” but there is no extant score in his hand, and the opera as we have it almost certainly includes portions that are not his. Music both for the prologue and for parts of Act II is missing (the witches; Aeneas, Dido, and Belinda; the storm; the spirit’s warning that Aeneas must leave); the opera’s Tenbury manuscript at the Bodleian Library dates from about the mid-eighteenth century and is all that survives of anything attributed to Purcell. Even that is thought to be at least three stages from Purcell’s original, and to include some eighteenth-century music.

Dido ’s plot is based upon Purcell-Tate’s revised take on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid (29-19 BC). That epic was written long after Aeneas’s pilgrimage after the fall of Troy (c. 12-11th century BC) as recorded in Homer’s Iliad (8th century BC). Virgil designed his poem as a pre-history of the Roman Empire that culminates in the Emperor Augustus. Aeneas’s dalliance is written from the male point of view: the gods require him to leave his lover and get on with the job of founding Rome. Dido kills herself with Aeneas’s sword. Compassionate Juno spares her a lingering death, but before being placed on a funeral pyre Dido calls for revenge against Aeneas and hence against Rome to be – a cry commonly thought acted upon by the Carthaginian Hannibal (247-183 BC) in his effort to destroy Rome. In contrast, Purcell’s Dido dismisses Aeneas who has been deceived by a false messenger acting on orders by Dido’s enemy, a sorceress and her witch companions. This messenger fabricates the demand that Jove orders Aeneas’s departure. He later tells Dido that he will defy the gods on her behalf, but she rejects his offer, after which he storms off in a hissy fit being sure to slam the door behind him. In grief, she sings her own sadly glorious funeral song, asking only to be remembered. Dido, as a woman, is hurt by Aeneas’s uncertain love. Even if the messenger was deceitful, she may know that Aeneas is “by fate to seek Italian ground.” Dido, as a queen, is insulted that her guest and lover has also become her deceiver: “Thus hypocrites that murder act / Make heav’n and gods the authors of the fact.” Staging Dido and Aeneas thus should include several peripheral but import issues, and at least two central issues: is the sorceress’s hatred well integrated into the plot, and does Dido die with the dignity that Purcell gives her? The answer to each question for the Los Angeles Opera’s production is: No.

The curtain rises gradually to reveal twenty-seven variously dressed principals and chorus members rigidly sitting on a sleek modern white bench that extends from one side of the stage to another. The handsomely dressed Queen Dido (Paula Murrihy) sits in the center, slightly apart from the others, solemnly staring ahead at the audience. The queen’s sister, Belinda (Kateryna Kasper), soon begins to advise Dido, whose melancholy she recognizes as Dido’s longing for her unfortunate but noble visitor Aeneas. He is a prince, a great warrior, a handsome man, and would make an admirable husband in an alliance between Carthage and restored Troy. Let there be merger.   A disparity between the excellent singing and Barrie Kosky’s crudely intrusive direction is immediately apparent.

Belinda is a royal speaking to her sister the head of state. That noble confidante is asked to sing and behave like a hectoring servant pushing her mistress into a liaison. Aeneas appears momentarily after Belinda says, “See, your royal guest appears; / How god-like is the form he bears!” The audience quite rightly giggled when the fine baritone Liam Bonner materialized at the far end of the long bench, looking like a shy schoolboy afraid to ask the pretty girl in his English class for a date. Belinda, the chorus, and the newly compliant Dido encourage Aeneas to make appropriate advances, at which point he passionately visits her neck – a tick that Kosky repeats elsewhere later in the opera.

All of this, and much more, works against a wonderful and complex dramatic opera, the afterlife of which, we shall see, extends to non-operatic memorial ventures. The opera itself borrows much from John Blow’s court masque Venus and Adonis . Dido may have been performed before Charles II’s court some years before 1689 and its first known performance “at Mr. Josias Priest’s Boarding School at Chelsey. By young Gentlewomen.”   Mrs. Priest ran the school, and Josias taught dance and other genteel arts to the young women, aged ten to seventeen, and other well-heeled adults. Dido and Aeneas thus is scored for eight, largely un-described, dance-sequences, only one of which finds its way into this Dido – a version of the Witches’ dance. The work was clearly conceived as a chamber opera with a small cast, and has often been so presented, such as in Paris, May of 2007. The Los Angeles director was presented with a major stumbling block: how to accommodate an opera designed for a small court venue, moved to an upscale girl’s boarding school, and thereafter performed as dance, in parts, and if in versions of the whole, as a theatrical after-piece in the limited stage and limited capacity early eighteenth-century theatre. In 1700 the rowdy Drury Lane sat six-hundred-and-fifty before its large expansion after mid-century. The Los Angeles Dorothy Chandler Pavilion seats three-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-seven politely ordered patrons.   To meet this challenge, Kosky sends much of his chorus into the baroque-style raised orchestra pit, from which they sometimes sing near Steven Sloane’s well-prepared ensemble. When the chorus is wholly on stage, Kosky forces it into various kinds of action, including metamorphosis to a large triangular lump to suggest a mountain. As with much else in the performance, these devices are idiosyncratic directorial impositions that distort rather than enhance the author’s design. The director must think that the audience’s imagination cannot conjure up the image of a distant mountain when the singer describes hills, dales, vales, woods, and a “lov’d mountain.”

The opera includes a major plot complication other than the relationship between Dido and Aeneas. Namely, why do the sorceress and her two witch colleagues want to kill Dido and send Aeneas away into a dangerous storm? The sorceress states her motivation: she hates Dido “As we do all in prosp’rous state.” She wishes to destroy Dido and Carthage and disturb Aeneas: “From the ruin of others our pleasures we borrow.” The contest is between national prosperity and national collapse, love and death, loyalty or infidelity by a princely man to a regal woman. Collapse, death, and infidelity win. The super-natural trinity sometimes laughs, but it is the laughter of evil delighted by its success. The cross-dressed countertenors John Holiday (sorceress), G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor (first and second witches), are more tenor than counter, but the chief problem again is conceptual. Kosky turns them into nominal comic relief, gives them spastic gestures, and has the sorceress make sexual overtures to Dido, whose neck he licks as if replacing Aeneas as suitor. The triumph of evil has been turned into a libidinous romp.

An even worse example of directorial over-reach, however, is the grotesque staging of Dido’s death. She rests on Belinda’s bosom but can do little more since “Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest” as Aeneas’s replacement. Then comes the mournful “When I am laid in earth, / . . . Remember me.” The score has this lament followed by Cupids in the clouds over her tomb, with the chorus asking them to spread roses upon it “Soft and gentle as her heart.” As an aside, it is worth noting that in Britain on each Remembrance Day the band of the Royal Marines plays Dido’s lament. Even arranged for brass it is known to bring tears to those present, whether they have lost someone in battle or in normal passing.   That is impossible for this Dido and Aeneas . The libretto does not specify how she dies, though the Opéra Comique in Paris, March 2012, sensibly had her take poison and die in her ladies’ arms. Here, Murrihy performs nobly while singing “Remember me, remember me, / But ah! forget not my fate.” But ah! we can do little else but remember her fate as a miserable death and long for Juno’s mercy in the Aeneid ’s comparable scene. Dido removes her elegant flowing gown and sits in her shift, presumably because a queen looks best in her underwear. Kosky has her sit alone gasping and wheezing for three minutes until she dies and the orchestra and chorus have filed out. As a result, the audience forgets her moving threnody and remembers what seems to be her internal self-throttling rather than her broken heart.

This staging originated at the Frankfurt Opera and then at the Edinburgh International Festival where it was again well received. Perhaps some imports should not have been exports, and what happened in Frankfurt should have stayed in Frankfurt.

Dido and Aeneas is at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, from 25th October until 15th November 2014.