Mark Morris's Dido and Aeneas (1989): A Critical Postmodern Sensibility

Abstract

In Mark Morris's Dido and Aeneas (1989) audiences witness a complex web of historical and cultural concerns that not only overlap with those of the story's historical and aesthetic precedents, but also come sharply into focus in relation to our current cultural position. In this close reading of the work in relation to its contexts, we examine the subtle intricacies of Morris's engagement with words, music, and history. Drawing on historical perspectives of gender and self-determination as well as contemporary theories of art as embodiment, we use detailed comparative analysis of music-dance-text structures to illustrate resonances between the past and the present. ¹

Notes

We refer to the Purcell Society score available in Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, an Opera, ed. Curtis Price (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986), 3–41. We identify at appropriate points in the text where Morris's ballet score differs from the Purcell Society score. Regarding the performance of the ballet, we refer to the film directed in 1995 by Barbara Willis Sweete, with Morris performing the roles of Dido and the Sorceress (Dido and Aeneas, choreographed by Mark Morris, featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group and Tafelmusik Orchestra and Chamber Choir [produced by Daniel Iron with Telefilm Canada Ontario Film Development Corporation, Rhombus Media, 1995]).

Edward J. Dent draws attention to Purcell's maintaining of tonality “on a definite scheme” throughout the opera. Thus, what comprises the first act in the libretto structure is in C major and minor. The witches' cave scene that follows has F as the main key. Dent remarks, “The choice of F minor for the witches is interesting; Purcell evidently regarded it as a very extreme and mysterious key, only to be used on rare occasions.” See Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century (1928; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), 181.

For an illuminating discussion of gestures in Morris's Dido and Aeneas, see Sophia Preston, “Echoes and Pre-Echoes: The Displacement of Time in Mark Morris's Dido and Aeneas,” Proceedings of Dancing in the Millennium: An International Conference, Washington, D.C., July 19–23, 2000; for a more recent and detailed examination of music and text in the work, see Stephanie Jordan, “Mark Morris Marks Purcell: Dido and Aeneas as Danced Opera,” Dance Research, vol. 29, no. 2 (2011): 167–213.

Variations on this “guts” motif occur throughout the ballet in different contexts. See Joan Acocella, Mark Morris (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 147ff.

Thunder machines were popular in the professional theater at the time and may have been used in Dido. Steven E. Plank notes, “This thunder and lightening was not only appropriate for a storm, but also appears to have been a stock device by which events were distinguished as supernatural (and which also covered the noise of the stage machinery in action).” See “‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing': Music and the Supernatural on the Restoration Stage,” Early Music, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 1990): 396. Morris amplifies the thunder effect through the dancers' rhythmically stomping feet—another example of his anti-illusionist treatment.

It sounds as though it is going to go from F# to B♭ (and thus stay in the key of G minor), but instead it goes from F natural to B♭, briefly but poignantly flirting with the key of B♭ major.

Evidence suggests that the sailors and witches are linked when, in act 3, scene 1 of the opera, the sailors' dance flows into the witches' celebrations at the success of their plot. See the Purcell Society score (in Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context”) for different degrees of overlap between the sailors and witches at this point.

See Andrew R. Walkling, “Political Allegory in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas,” Music and Letters, vol. 76, no. 4 (November 1995), 540–71.

Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens (1858) provides an example.

A libretto from the performance at Mr. Josiah Priest's school (1688/89) exists. The first known (Tenbury) score dates from after 1750. The opera was incorporated into a production of Measure for Measure in 1700, with both play and libretto altered to suit the needs of the production. See Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context.”

Andrew R. Walkling also argues that the central episode in the grove is, in fact, a masque-within-a-masque with its own allegorical significance arising from the Diana-Actaeon myth. He presents a persuasive case that in many ways “makes sense” of this ambiguous episode and of Aeneas's declamation “Behold, upon my bending spear,” which otherwise seems to come from nowhere (“The Masque of Actaeon and the Antimasque of Mercury: Dance, Dramatic Structure, and Tragic Exposition in Dido and Aeneas,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 63, no. 2 [2010]: 191).

While colonial expansion was desired for the potential riches it bought, it was also a considerable drain on the public purse because new territories and shipways had to be defended. Of particular relevance at the time of Purcell's opera was the ceding of the Portuguese port of Tangiers to Britain under the marriage agreement of the Portuguese Princess. See Deborah Payne Fisk and Jessica Munns, “‘Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire': Purcell and Tate's Dido and Aeneas,” Eighteenth Century Life, vol. 26, no. 2 (2001): 23–44.

See Ellen T. Harris, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1987; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Tate was persuaded that it could be construed as “arrogant” if he were to presume to use the revered Virgil's characters directly, so he altered the names of the protagonists in Brutus. Evidently he overcame these scruples when it came to Dido and Aeneas. See Fisk and Munns, “‘Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire,'” 29.

Tate based the libretto for Dido on his earlier work that also included a witch's intervention, Brutus of Alba (1678). Interestingly, in Dido the song “Oft she visits” and the dance to entertain Aeneas by Dido's women replace the masque in Brutus. For a detailed discussion of the significance of this scene and its intended function, see Walkling, “The Masque of Actaeon and the Antimasque of Mercury.”

Steven Plank cites Samuel Pepys here, among others, for evidence of ambivalent attitudes toward omens and the like. See Plank, “‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing,'” 394.

Focusing especially on the libretto of the opera, Andrew Welch considers the difficulties of assessing Tate's political position and its possible impact on the libretto. He contextualizes the opera in terms of the larger political context, changing attitudes toward Virgil, and attitudes toward the role of art making in life. Welch notes seventeenth-century interest in returning Dido to the chaste heroine of history (who commits suicide rather than submitting to an insistent suitor and who never meets Aeneas), far from the changeable Dido of Virgil—thus raising issues relating to women's suffering. He considers ambivalence related to public/private tensions and the role of fate or destiny as either something uncontrollable or something manufactured by humans for their own ends. See Andrew Welch, “The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas,” Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 21, no. 1 (2009): 1–26.

This distinction was odd, given that Tate was apparently a poet of only “modest talents.” See Ellen T. Harris, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; orig. 1987), 3.

Price wonders whether the sailors' apparent insensitivity to Aeneas's predicament at this point means that they “have become the puppets of the Sorceress.” Morris would appear to be running with the same idea here. See Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” 31.

After 2000 Morris cast other dancers in these roles, with a female dancer playing Dido and a male dancer, the Sorceress. See Joan Acocella, “Moving On” [Dido and Aeneas, dance review], The New Yorker, vol. 82, no. 8 (April 10, 2006): 88. More recently, a single female dancer has danced the two roles.

For a discussion of the significance of “bad counsel” as the central activating factor in the opera, see Walkling, “Political Allegory in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas,” Music and Letters, vol. 76, no. 4 (1994): 540–71.

Indeed, Gay Morris goes so far as to claim that “in Dido and Aeneas Morris used his own body as a site of gender instability to examine sexual desire.” See “‘Styles of the Flesh': Gender in the Dances of Mark Morris,” Moving Words, ed. Gay Morris (London: Routledge, 1996), 141–57.

Plank, “‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing,”' 394. For a discussion of masque and anti-masque, see Walkling, “The Masque of Actaeon and the Antimasque of Mercury,” 191.

Virgil, The Aeneid, prose translation by David West (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 69.

See Niall Rudd, “Dido's Culpa,” in Oxford Readings in Virgil's Aeneid, ed. S. J. Harrison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 145–66.

The libretto of the opera does allude to gods and goddesses in narrative songs, for example, the Diana and Actaeon myth presented as danced entertainment for the hunt in “Oft she visits this lone mountain” (act 1, scene 1).

But these tensions may well be traced in Virgil, too, as we have hinted above. Fisk and Munns provide a Cixousian analysis of the narrative: “In the Aeneid the brief moment in which a man might collaborate with woman in building and defending her realm, and the brief moment in which a city is founded and run by a woman, are imagined—and rejected. As Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put it in The Newly Born Woman, ‘The good love for a man is his country, the fatherland. A masculine land to hand down from father to son.'” Fisk and Munns continue with respect to the opera, “An alternative empire, in fact, is on offer, one that will be jointly ruled and which offers a seductive combination of sexual fulfillment and imperial rule with ‘Empire growing, / Pleasures flowing'” (“Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire,” 26, 30).

For a discussion of “magical stagecraft” of the era, see Plank “‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing,'” 396.

Fisk and Munns refer to Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, on this point (“Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire,” 43).

1. An early version of this paper was presented at the joint conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars and Dance Critics Association at Stanford University, Stanford and San Francisco in 2009, and published in the proceedings as Rachel Duerden and Bonnie Rowell, ”Fantastic Geographies: Dancing Dido across Continents, Centuries and Genders: From Ancient Rome, through Enlightenment London to Modern America,” Society of Dance History Scholars, Thirty-second Annual Conference, Topographies: Sites, Bodies, Technologies.

2. Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” in Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, an Opera, ed. Curtis Price (1984; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986): 23.

3. Joan Acocella, Mark Morris (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 147.

4. Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” 26.

5. Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), 191.

6. Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” 34.

7. Ibid., 35.

8. Ibid., 37.

9. Ibid., 38.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Wendy Heller, ‘“A Present for the Ladies': Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell's Dido,” Music & Letters (vol. 84, no. 2 [May 2003]: 189–208.

13. Deborah Payne Fisk and Jessica Munns, “‘Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire': Purcell and Tate's Dido and Aeneas” Eighteenth Century Life (vol. 26, no. 2, 2002): 23–44.

14. See Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context.”

15. Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O006883 (accessed March 25, 2011).

16. See Mark Goldie, “The earliest notice of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas,” Early Music, vol. 20, no. 3 (August 1992): 393–99; Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, “‘Unscarr'd by turning times'? The Dating of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas,” Early Music, vol. 20, no. 3 (August 1992): 373–90; Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence,” Early Music, vol. 22, no. 1 (February 1994): 115–25.

17. See Wood and Pinnock, “‘Unscarr'd by turning times'?”; Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O006883 (accessed March 25, 2011).

18. Fisk and Munns, “Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire,” 24.

19. Price in Harris, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, 33.

20. Heller, “A Present for the Ladies,” 208.

21. Andrew Welch, “The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas,” Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 21, no. 1 (2009): 8.

22. Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” 9.

23. John Buttrey, “A Cautionary Tale,” in Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, an Opera, ed. Curtis Price (1967–68; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986), 235.

24. Dent, Foundations of English Opera, 185.

25. Steven E. Plank, “‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing': Music and the Supernatural on the Restoration Stage,” Early Music, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 1990): 394.

26. Virgil Æneid, trans. David West (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), x.

27. Ibid., viii.

28. Charles Hazlewood, in Andy King-Dabbs, dir. and prod., The Birth of British Music: Purcell, written and presented by Charles Hazlewood (BBC Productions, 2009).

29. Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” 31.

30. Roger Savage, in Plank, “And Now About the Cauldron Sing,” 395.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Dent, Foundations of English Opera, 193.

34. Virgil, Ænead, Book 4, line 570.

35. Ellen Oliensis, “Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil's Poetry!” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 303.

36. Fisk and Munns, “Clamorous with War and Teeming with Empire,” 43.

37. Ibid., 29.

38. See Noël Carroll, “Art History and Narrative,” Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–100.

39. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 181.