Dawn Upshaw & Brentano Quartet:  “Dido Reimagined”

Internationally renowned soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Brentano Quartet join forces to explore the Renaissance world of Henry Purcell’s beloved opera Dido & Aeneas. Librettist Stephanie Fleischmann and Pulitzer Prize-winner Melinda Wagner created the groundbreaking Dido Reimagined — a new take on Dido’s tale with an unexpected ending.

COME EARLY to picnic beforehand—BYOP or pick up nosh on-site from Bon Appétit.

Commissioned By:
Chamber Music Northwest
Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College
Interlochen Center for the Arts
Rockport Music
Tisch Center for the Arts at 92nd St. Y
Wake Forest University - Secrest Artists Series
University of Maryland, Clarice Smith Center

Sponsor:
Powell’s City of Books

Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Saturday, 7/23 • 8:00 pm PT

Program

Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.

Fantasias, Suites & Songs of PURCELL, LOCKE, DOWLAND, TOMKINS, BYRD and JOHNSON

PURCELL O Let Me Weep from The Fairy Queen, Z. 629 (9’) (Arr. Mark Steinberg)

PURCELL Fantasia a 4, in B-flat Major Z. 736 • (4’)

LOCKE Suite No. 2 for four viols in D (Arr. Stephen Prutsman)

DOWLAND Come Again, Sweet Love doth Now Invite, IJD 3 (2’)

LOCKE Suite No. 2 in D Major (2’)
II. Courante

DOWLAND Can she excuse my wrongs • (3’) (Arr. Stephen Prutsman)

LOCKE Suite No. 2 in D Major - III. Ayre (2’)
III. Ayre

DOWLAND Weep you no more, sad fountains (4’)

LOCKE Suite No. 2 in D Major • (2’)
IV. Sarabande

TOMKINS Alman in F Major • (2’)

BYRD Through Amaryllis dance in green • (4’)

JOHNSON The Witty Wanton, IRJ 6 (3’)

PURCELL Fantasia No. 4 in C Minor, Z. 738 • (2’)

PURCELL When I am laid in earth (Dido’s Lament) from Dido and Aeneas,
Z. 626 • (5’)

Imagine yourself before a painting by Vermeer. The light is soft, yet penetrating. The captured moment is inward, almost clandestine, yet here we are gazing into it, in relationship with it. The scene is simple, mundane even, yet replete with intricate detail, rewarding close attention. The intimacy of the experience, unassuming and direct, can also be piercingly emotional. We see the painting; simultaneously it seems to see into us.

This blending of interiority with revelation, this clarity of vision melding the rational and the instinctive, is a quality often evinced by the English music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We, as a string quartet, have in our ancestry the plaintive, pungent voices of the viol family, as well as the idea of the viol consort as an intimate gathering of friends conversing, cavorting, and entangling strands of sense and sound. Our group has long been enriched by exploring this repertoire, enjoying the vibrant camaraderie and the frisson of lines that lean into each other as they both frolic and keen. The song repertoire of the period is, if anything, even more vulnerable, delicate, and disarmingly pellucid. Gathering works here by composers Henry Purcell, John Dowland, Matthew Locke, Thomas Tomkins, William Byrd, and Robert Johnson (who supplied music for Shakespeare’s productions) gives us a chance to shrink the concert hall into a parlor, to invite our audience to be our confidantes. The music combines elements of the public and the private; the listener can eavesdrop on the proceedings and can get drawn into the conversations and collisions, the friendliness, and the frictions.

And with whom better to do this than Dawn Upshaw, a treasured collaborator of ours? Dawn has a way, when she sings, of making you feel she is speaking plainly, with utter candor, right to you, so beautifully suited to music both confessional and personal. The first half of our collaborative program weaves together instrumental and vocal music, starting and ending with Purcell arias on love and loss. The final aria, the perennially beloved Dido’s Lament, opens the door for the great new monodrama in the second half, Melinda Wagner and Stephanie Fleischmann’s Dido Reimagined, a reexamination of the archetypal figure of Dido, an operatic investigation drawn into the world of chamber music. It is with great gratitude for this new work and great excitement for the opportunity to discover it and bring it to life that we offer this program.

© Mark Steinberg

———————-

Oh Let Me Weep (Purcell)

O let me forever weep!
My Eyes no more shall welcome sleep:

I’ll hide me from the sight of Day,
and sigh my Soul away.

He’s gone, his loss deplore;
and I shall never see him more.

O let me weep! forever weep!

Come again! (Dowland)
(selected verses)

Come again!
Sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
All the night
My sleeps are full of dreams,
My eyes are full of streams.
My heart takes no delight
To see the fruits and joys that some do find
And mark the storms are me assign’d.

Come again!
That I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.

Can She Excuse My Wrongs (Dowland)

Can she excuse my wrongs with virtue’s cloak?
shall I call her good when she proves unkind?
Are those clear fires which vanish into smoke?
must I praise the leaves where no fruit I find?

No, no: where shadows do for bodies stand,
thou may’st be abused if thy sight be dim.
Cold love is like to words written on sand,
or to bubbles which on the water swim.

Wilt thou be thus abused still,
seeing that she will right thee never?
if thou canst not overcome her will,
thy love will be thus fruitless ever.

2. Was I so base, that I might not aspire
Unto those high joys which she holds from me?
As they are high, so high is my desire:
If she this deny what can granted be?

If she will yield to that which reason is,
It is reasons will that love should be just.
Dear make me happy still by granting this,
Or cut off delays if that I die must.

Better a thousand times to die,
then for to live thus still tormented:
Dear but remember it was I
Who for thy sake did die contented.

Weep You No More, Sad Fountains (Dowland)

Weep you no more, sad fountains;
What need you flow so fast?
Look how the snowy mountains
Heaven’s sun doth gently waste.
But my sun’s heavenly eyes
View not your weeping,
That now lie sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

Sleep is a reconciling,
A rest that peace begets.
Doth not the sun rise smiling
When fair at even he sets?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
Melt not in weeping
While she lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

Though Amaryllis dance in green (Byrd)
(selected verses)

Though Amaryllis dance in green
  Like Fairy Queen,
  And sing full clear;
Corinna can, with smiling cheer.
Yet since their eyes make heart so sore,
Hey ho! chil love no more.

My sheep are lost for want of food
  And I so wood
  That all the day
I sit and watch a herd-maid gay;
Who laughs to see me sigh so sore,
Hey ho! chil love no more.

When I am laid in Earth (Purcell)

When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

 

MELINDA WAGNER ‘Dido Reimagined’

MELINDA WAGNER, composer
STEPHANIE FLEISCHMANN, librettist

“Dido Reimagined” a response to Purcell’s “Lament” • (25’)
WEST COAST PREMIERE • CMNW CO-COMMISSION

Dido, Queen of Carthage, was a remarkable woman. Unlike many heroines in the pantheon of Greek and Roman mythology, her beginnings were not rooted in aether. Nor was she merely a figment of the classical imagination. A historical figure who became myth, Dido has shifted shape and agendas through the ages. She has been transmogrified from lived personage to fictional character by Virgil in The Aeneid; by playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe in the play, Dido, Queen of Carthage; and by Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate in their opera, Dido and Aeneas, from which this evening’s “Lament” is excerpted; as well as by writers from Ovid to Dante, from Petrarch to Chaucer and beyond.

The real Dido, whose name evokes meanings encompassing “beloved” and “the wanderer,” was most likely a Phoenician queen of the city-state of Tyre, which is now Ṣūr, in Lebanon. After Dido’s brother murdered her husband, she fled to what is currently Tunisia, where the Berber king Iarbas offered her as much land as could be encircled by an ox hide. Dido cut the hide into strips, exponentially expanding the perimeter of her new kingdom, which would become Carthage, the prosperous city-state she founded. The “Dido Problem” in mathematics—the oldest problem in the Calculus of Variations—takes its name from Dido’s innovative thinking. King Iarbas’s offering did not come without strings attached. To avoid having to marry him, Dido built a funeral pyre and committed suicide, a practice not uncommon during the Greco-Roman era. In Dido’s clear-sighted hands, the gesture took the form of political protest.

When Melinda Wagner and I first spoke about writing a contemporary Dido for Dawn Upshaw and the Brentano String Quartet, we knew immediately that our Dido would not partake of the depiction of women imprinted on us by men through the centuries. We knew, too, that Dido’s epic love for Aeneas and her self-immolation in response to what she perceived as his abandonment of her—romantic tropes devised by Virgil and immortalized by Purcell and Tate (for Aeneas post-dated Dido by anywhere between 50 and 400 years)—needed to metamorphose in our hands. We were compelled by the notion of an epic love in contemporary times. What form might that take for a powerfully strong, complex woman of today, who has long realized her full potential in terms of both career and family? A woman whose experience of first love is but a distant memory. How does she allow herself to get so knocked off kilter, so swept off her feet? What is the fallout of that? In both Virgil and Purcell/Tate’s versions, Dido’s lovesickness is incited and meddled with by Venus and Juno. But in an era without any gods, where does that intensity of feeling come from? It seemed to us that there was no better medium than music with which to explore this question.

Dido of ancient times, whether real or fictional, had no choice. Our Dido, however, has the power to determine her own fate. I have been lucky enough to keep returning, over the years, to a writing retreat on an island where there are no cars, no shops, only a few houses, and a landscape strewn with ancient rocks, covered with windblown trees, and ringed by sea. Our Dido’s refuge was inspired by my time in this place. Our Dido does not choose death. She removes herself from the everyday world, she chooses solitude. She returns to nature, she becomes one with it.

Together, Melinda and I have attempted to make something between a song cycle and a monodrama. A piece of music drama that is simultaneously journey and meditation. A reflection on the power of love, on the passage of time, on loss, resilience, and the restorative power of a disappearing world.

© Stephanie Fleischmann

—————————

Dido Reimagined, a response to Purcell’s “Lament”

A Monodrama
for Dawn Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet

Music by
Melinda Wagner

Libretto by
Stephanie Fleischmann (2019)

Epigraphs
He sought her. He sought her everywhere. Through the nakednesses
of his imagination. In sorrow. In foxholes. As deer flicker way off in a wood in late winter.
…
This wind at Night carrying it all over the Sky like Quartets
      or Dido surviving between Lightning Sets.
—Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” this acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).
—Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Some lovers do not commit suicide.
—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

While rivers run into the sea and the shadows
still sweep the mountain slopes and stars still pasture
upon the sky, your name and praise and honor
shall last, whatever be the lands that call me.
—Virgil, Dido & Aeneas, Book 1
      translated by Allen Mandelbaum

Libretto

1. end of summer

DIDO
I am not dead.
I did not die.
Overcome, I did not throw myself
on the funeral pyre—
or off the roof,
nine stories high.
I did not thrust myself over the balcony railing,
or fill a bath, lock the door,
and bleed myself to death
like a good, honorable Roman.

I am not dead.
I hijacked a lobster boat instead—
Ursa, the bear—
ordered her skipper to take me north;
motored eight hours up the coast
against the wind,
whitecaps scarring obsidian sea,
detritus of a parade of distant storms—
hurricane season—
charting our course.

On the way, I saw:
a humpbacked whale,
dolphins circling the prow,
osprey, plovers, bluefish, bass,
an army of undulating jellyfish.
These were not Portuguese Men of war—
they were pink—
but they stung all the same.
I dove in. I wanted to be stung.
I wanted to feel the unbearable pain
scoring, piercing my shoulder blades.
I wanted one stinging pain to erase the other.

No, I am not dead.
I did not hijack a boat.
I stole a car
so my passage would not be traced,
on the run,
throttling past
I can’t breathe, can’t sleep, can’t eat, I can’t go on.

Or, I if I did not steal a car,
I took the bus,
paying my fare in cash,
riding beside
a grey-skinned, gravel-voiced
husk of a woman,
her allotment of hope
ransacked decades ago,
all the way from Port Authority,
its purgatorio,
to Sea Stone Harbor.

Not dead,
not wholly alive,
I hijacked a boat, stole a car, rode the bus,
rowed a dinghy across the sound,
mooring it here,
this island, overrun
with wild chamomile, asters, rosehips, goldenrod,
ancient spreading oak—
taking root in an old stone house,
salt air fading the patterns
papering the walls,
grazing meadows in the distance
littered with the sun-bleached bones of fallen sheep,
wild irises growing like gold
at the edges of ponds,
and the sea,
everywhere I turn.

I came here, to this island,
and I stayed.
Away.
Apart from the pith of the world
but in it.
To reflect on what I’d lost.
To wrest myself from it.
To remember—
deeper in,
farther back—
turn that remembering
inside out,
exhume yesterday,
resurrect tomorrow,
shed my skin,
shake it off,
sand between toes,
salt grasses underfoot,
trampled by the horses
that make this place their home.

2.  autumn

DIDO
As a child, Dido summered here,
running wild, free,
riding the length of the island,
chasing flights of plovers, swallows,
traversing inlet and marsh,
glade and hollow,
tasting first love
before she wed,
before she was widowed—still young—
and turned her back on this place.

Left to her own devices,
she built an empire of her own,
filling the space her widowing had left
with a flourishing.
Steady. Measured. Kind.
Generous.
She had known love.
She didn’t need more of it.
And yet she was loved.
Her world was full.

Until she fell.

3. winter

DIDO
You look up.
You see a man.
You see beauty
in the eyes of the other.

Red glow of glimmering hearth
on cold mornings in an old house—
the fire is lit.
You are undone.
Sleepless,
beset,
welter of racing heart
and melt of skin.
You will do anything
for those eyes,
undo all you have made—
stave off sense and care.
The you you thought you knew,
boxed up,
stashed safely away
from the long-ago throes of longing,
has betrayed you.

Jupiter raped Calisto.
Juno turned her into a bear.
Jupiter, who wanted to possess
the broken bear of a girl,
tossed Juno’s Ursa to the night sky,
a constellation to navigate by:
Ursa major,
the Wagon,
the Big Dipper,
pointing north,
towards
Ursa Minor,
the pole star,
by which Ursula and her eleven-thousand martyred virgins
made their way—
tangle of femurs, pelvises, rib bones, eleven-hundred-year-old skulls—
resting in a reliquary in Cologne.

You are not dead.
You hijacked a lobster boat instead—
Ursa, the bear—

4. spring

DIDO
Cove, silt, ash, peat,
common tern’s blazing beak,
blue heron standing by.
I am old. Weathered.
Winter on this island,
a thing to behold.
Lone inhabitant.
Mail boat bringing supplies
every odd week—
olive oil, oranges, kerosene,
envelopes,
post-marked the world over,
Dido scrawled in the blurry
hand of the beloved.
I toss the letters, unopened,
into the smoldering flame
and set out,
across upland pasture,
through sepia woods,
past silent stones,
blind-siding lament
as I gather barnacles from tidal pools, moon stones on silver beach,
a riot of rosa rugosa heralding
yet another spring—
cove, silt, ash, peat,
common tern’s blazing beak,
blue heron standing by.

5. summer

DIDO
Dido dissolves into the sea.
Dido disappears.
Elides with the horizon line.

Dido rises with the sun.
Rose light of dawn.
Clean, new air of day.

Dido doles out mist and squalls,
north winds,
sweet, still, surrendering
summer afternoons.

Dido descends with the dark.
Silver moon washing the island.
Inky, starry sky.

But Dido doesn’t die.
Dido remains.
Keeps coming back
each turning day.
In the crash of the waves
against the bow of the skiff,
the striped bass flocking the bay,
the bells sounding across the reach.
In the tall grass.
And the lichen-cragged stones,
the water-logged marsh,
the cormorant’s cry,
the waiting heron,
the swallow’s crossing,
the beech trees’ stirring,
the big dipper
splayed across the night.
Dido wonders:
Is this what it is to die?
But no. Dead or alive, Dido knows:
She is love.
She is love.

« Back