Dido and Aeneas

Notes

The Chelsea date rests on a surviving printed libretto; Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock have argued for a court origin around 1684, and the question is genuinely open. The cast is unrecorded. No score survives from Purcell's lifetime. The earliest source, the Tenbury manuscript, is no earlier than the mid-eighteenth century, is divided into three acts against the libretto's prologue-plus-three, omits the prologue music entirely, and lacks the end of the grove scene. Every modern performance therefore involves editorial reconstruction, but no single reconstruction has become standard enough to record as its own version.