Joyce DiDonato as Dido in Madrid is imperious

Yon Dido gets about a bit. 2,750 years ago, hers was a simple one-way journey, a boat trip from Tyre – Lebanon – to Carthage – Tunisia. Come 2024, the fearless queen is totting up the air miles, touring Europe and plonking down a massive carbon footprint.

Luxemberg on 14 January, Madrid on 4 February, Paris on 8 February, Hamburg on 14 February, Essen on 16 February. On this whirlwind tour, Dido is American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. DiDonato takes on crazy schedules to unusual places whenever her artistic appetite is whetted by a role. She whizzed her breath-taking Eden song cycle around the planet in 2022.

Hang on. Essen? My nose twitched. That was where I was confronted last June by a taxi driver in my hotel lobby, who bizarrely insisted I was Joyce DiDonato. Who knew Joe Biden did Uber? 

“Tout s’explique”, as Hercule might say. Joyce had been casing the joint on behalf of Dido. I was there for director, Floris Visser’s innovative take on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Dido’s Lament is, of course, possibly the best known ten minutes of gut-wrenching tragedy in Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. DiDonato is always at the top of her considerable game whenever and wherever she sings it. Up there with Jesse Norman and Dame Janet Baker, my other two favourite exponents. Worth a tour of Europe.

I caught up with the founder of Carthage in Madrid, at the magnificent Teatro Real opera house. The performance was a double-bill concert rather than fully staged performances. 

First up, an oratorio, Jeptha, by Giacomo Carissimi (1605 – 1674), a composer of whom I had never heard. Then, Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695). This was the Italy/England showdown in an early Baroque Opera Six Nations. 

England won hands down. Jeptha, was engaging enough, but mannered and lifeless compared with Purcell’s exuberant and dramatic Dido.

This is a wonderful entry opera for those suspicious of the formalities and remoteness of baroque opera. Don’t think “it’s not for me”. 

It is a short thriller. Purcell introduces the piece with a prologue, gives prominence to choral parts, creates dance sequences featuring witches as ground-breaking and ritualistic as in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and compacts the tragedy into 52 minutes of spellbinding action. The work is neither stuffy nor boring.

Handel’s later baroque oratorios and operas – 1705 to 1741 – lifted the baroque musically to another level, but they did bang on a bit. Giulio Cesare runs for 3 hours 15 minutes!  

Purcell introduced novel sounds into the orchestration, such as a large thunder machine. In Madrid, the percussionist beat the bejeesus out of a massive sheet of malleable metal, making thunder roar, while witches brewed and heroines were struck down.  

“Concert” does not do this performance justice as it was, effectively, semi-staged. The chorus moved front occasionally, the witches were beautifully choreographed, stirred up by Scottish mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor, currently singing mostly with Frankfurt Opera, 

Even slight interactions between Dido and her handmaiden Belinda, sung by Fatma Said, an Egyptian soprano living in London, were intensely moving.  

DiDonato as Dido was imperious. Even long familiarity with the mezzo’s driven need to immerse herself totally in her roles and assume character convincingly, did not blunt the impact of her interpretation. Her voice flows seamlessly from vibrant outrage to sibilant pathos. 

Concert version, so no props – spears, tridents, swords, that kind of thing. But there was the helmet. Hang on. Dido has no helmet. It’s a hairstyle fashioned as a simulacrum of a Trojan headpiece. 

Starting from the humble beginnings of a razor cut around the neck, into feathering, then on to many layered hues of brunette through blonde, Joyce’s hair morphed into a structure of which any engineer would be proud, divided sharply by a right-hand parting. 

The hair on the right behaved itself reasonably. On the left, its unruly confrère towered out of control into a confection of coiffed wonder. Aeneas stood no chance against it. DiDonato expends much time on the impact of her hair. Check out the multi-coloured wonder that is her Eden getup. 

One of the attractions of the Dido plot for newbie operagoers is that the storyline is remarkably uncluttered. And the more impactful for it.

Based on the love relationship between the queen of Carthage, Dido, and the Trojan Aeneas, the opera begins when Aeneas and his troops are shipwrecked in Carthage. Aeneas falls in love with Dido. 

But, out of envy of Dido, the witches persuade Aeneas that he is duty-bound to return to Troy. Dido laments that she cannot live without her love and Aeneas decides to stay. She rejects him because he had even considered leaving in the first place and commits suicide. That’s all, folks! 

The libretto is written by Nahum Tate, an Anglo-Irish poet who became poet laureate in 1692. One annoying dramatic quirk of later baroque operas is the too often contrived happy ending, after characters with impossibly conflicting storylines in a labyrinthine plot stare inevitable tragedy in the face, only to be rescued by a deus ex machina, usually a repentant God who has caused the mayhem in the first place. At a stroke, harmony is restored to all. Happy chorus. Goodnight. 

Not so with Tate. Dido’s trust, once undermined by Aeneas’ original decision to heed the call of duty, preferring service over her, was shattered, never to be restored. That drew from Purcell one of the most enthralling ten minutes of music ever written. No happy ending to soften the emotional blow. 

Music was provided courtesy of the ensemble, il Pomo D’Oro, under the direction of Maxim Emelyanychev. Having toured with DiDonato on the Eden project they were the ideal combination for this project.  

Teatro Real has a tradition of hosting baroque performances, as the director of music, Ivor Bolton, is a huge fan. Emelyanychev enhanced the reputation of the house as a centre of Baroque excellence. As, of course, did Joyce DiDonato whose Dido left the packed Madrid house enraptured. 

And Another Thing!

Digging around for background on who else might be on the Dido trail, I stumbled across a film gem. The story of Scottish Opera’s 1978 tour to Aix en Provence Festival to perform Dido and Aeneas, starring Janet Baker. 

Filmed as a documentary Another Opening – Another Show by Scottish Television, the story of the production and its travails in the heat of Provence is told in gory detail.

For a Glaswegian heading out on the Scottish Opera journey in the 1970s, this was gold dust. Nothing was overlooked. The banter between the two lorry drivers who arrived late in Aix with the scenery because their Scottish pantechnicon had been detained by French Customs is hilarious.

“We didn’ae have our carney (carnet) did we?” 

“Naw, and they kept us in til the next morning and we had to try to find a hotel, but they were all ‘complette’ (complet). Anyway we did find one in Orange”

“Oor load was worth six grand and they were letting through lorries with boats worth thousands.”

Director, Peter Ebert is to be seen in snazzy trunks cooling off in a hotel pool and there is a cringeworthy interview with pukka Labour Arts Minister of the day, Lord Donaldson which would make Bertie Wooster gulp.

Then, late on in the rehearsal at the end of the documentary, Janet Baker, always a supporter of Scottish Opera in its early days, arrives and tries, hopelessly, to don the most complex visored helmet I have ever seen. Cut! Where was Joyce DiDonato’s hairdresser in 1978?

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