Talk:Dido and Aeneas

Delete big section?
There is a thorough and well written article on the original Aeneid in the Wikipedia already. I suggest that the entire section on the orginal Aeneid be deleted from this article. If there is something in that section which is not covered in the Aeneid article, it should probably be moved there. I would further suggest that the section be replaced by a brief explanation of significant differences between the traditional telling and Tate's, such as the addition of the witches and Belinda. I appreciate that people have worked hard on this section, it just doesn't seem appropriate to this article.Makemi 05:49, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

GA Re-Review and In-line citations
Members of the WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 02:02, 26 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Inline citations added, thanks to Makemi. I've just done a minor clean-up - wikilinked voices etc - but just wanted to ask whether or not it would be better to use the small formatting for the inline cits, as in The Fairy Queen? I don't know which formatting is looked on with more favour, but personally I prefer that which we used for FQ and which I copied for List of major opera composers. Cheers, Moreschi 18:49, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh right, sure, I've changed the references to being small. If there's anything which people think needs an inline citation, please let me know specifically what you want cited, I can probably find the source for it (i.e. please don't just write that there isn't one citation per 75 characters, but give specific facts that you want cited). Mak (talk)  18:53, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Now referenced and inline cited. Mak (talk)  00:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

request for content
Could some erudite person please write about why the Sorceress is listed in the Novello score as a bass, but is frequently performed by sopranos? Students would like to know these things. Dveej 15:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

"Since it was first performed at a girls' school, we might assume that the tenor and bass parts in the chorus were added at a later date. In modern performances, sometimes the Sailor and the Sorceress are played by women." (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A425909) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mistleymatt (talk • contribs) 11:46, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Response The opera is known to have first been performed at a girls' school but it has been suggested and has now been backed by many Purcell historians that the work could have been written as early as late 1683. The main text on this would have to be cited as being Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock's article "Unscarr'd by turning times"?: the dating of Dido and Aeneas", Early Music XX (August 1992).

Bruce Wood is actually one of my lecturers, renowned for his knowledge on Purcell - he recently took part in a week of radio shows on Purcell for the BBC and has a book coming out this summer.In the lecture on this work, he discussed his theories behind this. In regard to the above the Sorceress would have been played by a male voice to make the role more convincing and dramatic(backed by the musical part which seems out of context and including consecutive 8ves when it is written for female but is fine when lowers at the 8ve for a bass. Out of style for the Baroque.) Also the sailor is performed by a female because in the context of the times, midshipmen were generally young teen boys whose voices hadn't dropped yet.

If someone IS going to write up on the original request then SOME note has to be made about this. Otherwise, students looking at this article will miss a huge contrasting theory on what is not a simple matter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.159.64.124 (talk) 20:26, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Lyrics?
Someone should provide them. --MosheA 22:46, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. See the link at the foot of the page. - Kleinzach 23:32, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Placement of scenes
According to the New Grove, the scene in the witches' cave is the first scene of Act 2, instead of the last scene of act 1. Should this be changed, or has this been discussed earlier? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.64.92.231 (talk) 05:01, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Æneas vs. Aeneas
I see that an editor objected to the use of Æneas throughout the article, and changed them all to Aeneas. I’m with him 100%. Typographic ligature tells the story:


 * The character Æ (æ, or aesc) when used in the Danish, Norwegian, or Icelandic languages, or Old English, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct letter—a vowel—and when alphabetised, is given a different place in the alphabetic order. In modern English orthography Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: "encyclopædia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia". ... Æ comes from Medieval Latin, where it was an optional ligature in some words, for example, "Æneas". It is still found as a variant in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards printing the A and E separately.[5]

In brief, it's old hat, stodgy, pretentious and unnecessary. This article is the only place I've ever seen it spelled Dido and Æneas. It’s virtually always Dido and Aeneas. What are we hoping to do by going backwards with our orthography? I intend to move the article to Dido and Aeneas unless there are objections. -- JackofOz (talk) 11:11, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Please go ahead. Do we expect people to type Æneas in their search engines? Nunquam Dormio (talk) 11:25, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not wild about using the ligature either. --Folantin (talk) 11:26, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Very sensible change. Hans Adler 11:34, 22 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick responses. It's now been moved.  --  JackofOz (talk) 11:45, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Media file: 'Stay, Prince and hear'
I removed this file from the media section on the suggestion of the GA reviewer, see Talk:Dido and Aeneas/GA1. Now I am somewhat amazed to see it replaced - as an external link with the edit summary "perfectly reasonable external link though.' by Pmanderson. A joke? -- Klein zach  00:48, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

GA Reassessment
For the Good Article Reassessment in January 2010, see: /GA1.

Date of work
There's a bit of and  about the date of this work at List of compositions by Henry Purcell. This article on Dido and Aeneas seems to be at least partly responsible. Its text mentions 1688, but the navigation box and category use 1689, as do the other four language Wikipedias I checked. I think it would improve this article and avoid confusion at Purcell's list of compositions if this article could state an unambiguous date of the first performance. If that's not possible, it should be explained here and in the list. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:20, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah, you'll be lucky if you get an unambiguous date for the premiere. Scholars have been arguing over that for decades. New Grove says ?Spring 1689 (but possibly performed earlier). --Folantin (talk) 13:55, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The 1883 Groves I have doesn't seem to mention Dido and Aeneas at all. It gets neither an article of its own nor any mention under Purcell. One of my boyhood books glibly states that it was written expressly for a girls' school, but I doubt that's citeable. It should however give us pause in quoting any date; We should instead report and cite the various scholarly opinions. Andrewa (talk) 12:37, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I recall seeing an early copy of the score in the vault at St Michaels Tenbury in the late '70s. When the school closed it would have gone to the bodlean with the rest of Ouseley's collection. Are people sure that there is no original extant since this copy was claimed as such at the time. {Rebecca Baty} — Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.3.50.254 (talk) 12:26, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

First Performance
Whoever keeps reverting my edits, please read the source cited on the incorrect 1688 date. The source clearly says "From the collected evidence the sum total of certain conclusions that can be drawn about Dido's early history is that it was performed at Josias Priest's boarding school for girls in Chelsea sometime before the end of 1689." http://em.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/3/417.extract Darktangent (talk) 23:12, 2 November 2015 (UTC)


 * You have not read this article all of the way through. The article is completely clear on the fact that the opera was performed at Priest's School not later than summer 1688. For instance, read the last two sentences of the article (p. 426): 'On the date it is unequivocal. Dido and Aeneas was written no later than July 1688'. If you aren't satisfied with that, look at 'Communications', Curtis Price and Andrew R. Walkling, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 266-274 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.97.178.115 (talk) 23:04, 5 November 2015 (UTC)


 * On page 420 the article does indeed state that "Sherman therefore learned about Dido and Aeneas, and presumably the performance at Priest's school, no later than July 1688." The last two sentences that you quoted are irrelevant, as they pertain to when it was written. The dates that I changed in this article pertained to the year of the first performance.  I am still unclear since on the first page (417) it states "From the collected evidence the sum total of certain conclusions that can be drawn about Dido's early history is that it was performed at Josias Priest's boarding school for girls in Chelsea sometime before the end of 1689."  The quote with the year 1688 says 'presumably', and presumptions shouldn't be included in this article unless it is made clear that it is a presumption.  The 'Communications' article you linked references the Bryan White article, and incorrectly at that.  It makes a statement that the first performance was in 1688, yet the Bryan White article never makes that statement, and only says what I quoted before, that an 1688 performance was presumed.  Sherman could have simply learned what he did from viewing a score.

It seems that this mistake in the article came about when the user Arcalaus misread the last two sentences of the source as the date of the performance. The only time the article mentions the month of July is there. This user then incorrectly stated that the first PERFORMANCE was no later than July 1688, when that statement was referring to when it was written. Darktangent (talk) 03:33, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Arclaus did not misread the article, but it is true to say that he did not include all of the detail. Page 422 of the article strongly suggests an early performance date: 'Until further evidence is found, 1 December 1687 provided a plausible date for a performance of Dido and Aeneas at Chelsea School'.
 * The source said it was written no later than July 1688, but it appeared his revision to the article stated that it was first PERFORMED no later than July 1688. That's a moot point now anyways since these things have been fixed by myself and mostly Arcalaus, and the article now provides much more information and more accurately conveys information from the sources it cites.  We've made some great improvements to the article--I'm proud!  Darktangent (talk) 05:42, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Your criticisms of the way in which the date is presented in the article are addressed by a revision which adds more detail, and includes some hedging of bets. References to more recent literature on the dating and composition of the opera are also added. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arcalaus (talk • contribs) 08:38, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I edited statements about the first performance date to more accurately reflect Bryan White's article, and to avoid weasel words like 'probably'. I also added additional citations of the Bryan White article, as well as page numbers for easy reference. Let me know what you think. Darktangent (talk) 04:18, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

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