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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1967
Although Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera which most people remember today, it is wrong to think that it was the first operatic work to be seen in London. That honour belongs to a through-composed French work, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus. This opera was performed only once, and that was at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 30 March 1674. The music was the work of the French composer, Louis Grabu, who at that time was attached to the English court as Composer of the King's Musick. Then, about the same period, two English operas were seen at The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Garden. One was a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the other was Psyche by Thomas Shadwell, but both of these pieces included spoken dialogue and do not concern us here. But a decade later, in 1685, the through-composed opera by Dryden and Grabu, Albion and Albanius, was given six performances at The Duke's Theatre. So it was Ariane and this work that were the predecessors of Purcell's opera.
1 The libretto is at The Royal College of Music, London.Google Scholar
2 Noted by A. M. Laurie, Purcell's Stage Works (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), Cambridge, 1962, p. 51.Google Scholar
3 Foundations of English Opera, Cambridge, 1928, p. 178.Google Scholar
4 Edward Halle, The Union of the … famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, London, 1548 (reprinted 1809), pp. 423, 428.Google Scholar
5 Roy C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford, 1963, p. 68, and Plates 45, 46.Google Scholar
6 Roberta Florence Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century, Baltimore, 1933, p. 10.Google Scholar
7 ‘… The greatest blessing fate can give,Google Scholar
Our Carthage to secure and Troy revive.Google Scholar
When monarchs unite, how happy their state,Google Scholar
They triumph at once on their foes and their fate …’Google Scholar
8 Foundations of English Opera, p. 106.Google Scholar
9 John Dryden, Preface to Albion and Albanius, London, 1685, [p. 2].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 The Ode was published in The Gentleman's Journal, April 1693, pp. 120–21.Google Scholar
11 See the appropriate entries in Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, Oxford, 1857.Google Scholar