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Music and Letters 2003 84(2):189-208; doi:10.1093/ml/84.2.189
© 2003 by Oxford University Press
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‘A Present for the Ladies’: Ovid, Montaigne, and the Redemption of Purcell's Dido

Wendy Heller1

1 Princeton University

The influence of Ovid and Montaigne on the creation of Purcell's Dido and Aeneasis reconsidered in the context of A Present for the Ladies, a ‘historical vindication of the female sex’ by the librettist Nahum Tate (1692), and its literary sources. I propose that Tate's Dido can be understood as an elaborate defence of his heroine, one that is indebted far more to Ovid than to Virgil, endowing the heroine with the neo-Stoic virtue and resolve associated with the pre-Virgilian version of the Dido legend. Purcell's setting of the lament emphasizes still further the purification and redemption of Dido, and may help to explain why Dido's lament (much like Virgil's Aeneid) has been taught to generations of music students.


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