Premiere and early revivals A letter from the Levant merchant Rowland Sherman associates
Dido and Aeneas with
Josias Priest's girls' school in
Chelsea, London no later than the summer of 1688. The first performance may have taken place as early as 1 December 1687, and evidence suggests that the opera was performed at the school again in 1689. Following the Chelsea performances, the opera was not staged again in Purcell's lifetime. Its next performance was in 1700 as a
masque incorporated into
Beauty the Best Advocate, an adapted version of Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure at
Thomas Betterton's theatre in London. After 1705 it disappeared as a staged work, with only sporadic concert performances, until 1895 when the first staged version in modern times was performed by students of the
Royal College of Music at London's
Lyceum Theatre to mark the bicentenary of Purcell's death.
Dido and Aeneas received its first performance outside England on 14 December 1895 in a concert version at the University Society in
Dublin.
20th- and 21st-century performances performs
When I am laid in Earth with Les Arts Florissants in 2020
Dido and Aeneas premiered in the United States at the
Plaza Hotel in New York City on 10 February 1923 performed by the girls of the Rosemary School, although
The New York Times noted that "considerable liberties" had been taken with the score. A concert version with professional musicians organised by the Society of Friends of Music took place on 13 January 1924 at the New York City Town Hall, using a score edited by
Artur Bodanzky, who also conducted the performance. As new critical editions of the score appeared, and with the revival of interest in Baroque music, the number of productions steadily increased. After
Jonathan Miller's visit to
Bornholm, Denmark,
Dido was performed in 2007 at the
Rønne Theatre, which had been built in 1823. Kevin Duggan conducted. Amongst the new productions of the opera in 2009, the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth, were those staged by the
De Nederlandse Opera, the
Royal Opera, London, the Divertimento Baroque Opera Company, and
Glimmerglass Opera in
Cooperstown, New York. The Royal Opera production, which featured contemporary dance by
Wayne McGregor Random Dance and animated effects by Mark Hatchard, formed part of a double bill with Handel's
Acis and Galatea. In 2011 the opera was revived by City Wall Productions and set during World War II. A new
Opera North production of the opera opened at
Leeds Grand Theatre in February 2013. Opera Up Close performed a truncated version in 2011, setting it in an American high school in the 1950s.
Adaptations A version of the opera adapted to
modern dance was choreographed by the American
Mark Morris, who originally danced both the roles of Dido and the Sorceress. It premiered on 11 March 1989 at the Théâtre Varia in Brussels. It has since been performed many times and was filmed in 1995 by Canadian director Barbara Willis Sweete, with Morris in the roles of Dido and the Sorceress. The production was subsequently seen at the Grand Théâtre in
Luxembourg,
Opéra national de Montpellier, and
Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. In the Morris adaptation, as well as another by Sasha Waltz, the characters are each portrayed by both a singer and a dancer, with the dancers on stage and the singers performing from the side of the stage or the
orchestra pit. ==Roles==