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PURCELL – Dido’s Lament ‘When I am Laid in Earth’ – FOUR CELLOS

Other Identification:
Dido’s Lament (“When I am laid in earth”) is the closing aria from the opera Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell to a libretto by Nahum Tate.
It is included in many classical music textbooks to illustrate the descending chromatic fourth (passus duriusculus) in the ground bass. The conductor Leopold Stokowski wrote a transcription of the piece for symphony orchestra.
The text, as well as Purcell’s opera, is based on the Aeneid, the Roman epic poem by Virgil about the Trojan warrior Aeneas, travelling to Italy from the fallen Troy in order to settle there and secure his son Ascanius’s lineage. Their ship is blown off course from Sicily, and they land on the shore of North Africa in Carthage, a town newly settled by refugees from Tyre. Aeneas falls in love with their queen, Dido, but dutifully departs for Italy, leaving her. Distraught at his betrayal, she orders a pyre to be built and set ablaze so that Aeneas will see from his ship that she has killed herself. She sings the lament before stabbing herself as Aeneas sails on.
Queen Dido’s iconic farewell offers a moment of stillness, dignity and beauty that lingers long after the last note fades.

Movements or sections:
marked ‘Larghetto’

Instrumentation:
QUARTET OF FOUR CELLOS
….
1 PDF, containg all four individual parts
(note that there is no general score)

Approximate difficulty:
Medium
Cello 1 reads in higher tenor clef throughout.

Dedicatee of this presentation (if applicable):
Cellists of the Navarre Symphony Orchestra (Spain), who first performed this version in the Civican Cultural Centre, Pamplona, Spain.

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David Johnstone lives near Pamplona (Navarre, Spain) with his wife Rosa and their two “Spanglish” children, close to the Atlantic Pyrenees. The nearest international airport is Bilbao.

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