In an in-depth look at the origins of Errollyn Wallen's new work – which is staged at the Edinburgh International Festival August 20-22 – the composer reflects on how the project came about, and what it means to her. Beneath that, some of the artists involved share their thoughts in a behind-the-scenes film, while conductor John Butt and librettist Welsey Stage write about their experiences of the opera's development.

Errollyn Wallen, composer
What is it about a subject that holds your attention for a lifetime? What are the roots of its fascination? For me and for so many people, the story of Dido and Aeneas has a resonance that has endured way beyond the Latin textbooks in which many of us first encountered it.

At 13, I was sent to an independent girls’ school in East Sussex. This experience completely changed my life and put me on course to be a professional composer. However, I was not to know that the Latin class would also pave a path for my future work. I was placed into Remove (the name of the class between fourth and fifth forms), the girls of which had already been learning Latin for a year. I was given a grammar book with the instruction not only to catch up on a year’s tuition by myself but also to join in the taught classes with pupils already in their second year. 

Needless to say, I didn’t comply with these instructions which is why, to this day, my Latin grammar is somewhat approximate. In the first classes, we studied Caesar’s Gallic Wars from which I learned words and phrases which would have equipped me well for battle: cohorts, hand to hand fighting, forced marches – quite possibly useful for a child growing up in Tottenham. These Gallic Wars were a series of military campaigns in which my classmates and I had, as you can imagine, less than a passing interest. They were waged by the Roman proconsul Julius Caesar against numerous Gallic tribes between 58 BC and 50 BC and culminated in the decisive Battle of Alesia in 52 BC, in which the Roman victory resulted in the expansion of its Republic over the whole of Gaul (ie present-day France and Belgium). I still remember all that.

Our genial teacher, Mr Sadler (the retired headmaster of a boys’ public school, nicknamed ‘Saddlebags’, and commonly remembered for the Bentley in which he drove to school) was clearly fascinated by military history in general. He was kind yet entirely without ambition for us. I still remember his open-mouthed shock at my not knowing what the opposite to front-to-front fighting was, when I replied to his question, ‘back to back!’.

Yet after the Gallic Wars were out of the way, we got to the poetry of Catullus, then Virgil and Ovid. These really moved me. Rather than the battles, I fell in love with the myths, with phrases such as ‘dearer to me than mine own eyes’, with their deep meditations on being a human being and the complexities of life, even though I did not yet fully know these. Two of my obsessions date from this time – the story of Daedalus (from Ovid) and the story of Dido and Aeneas (in Virgil’s Aeneid). I have now set both these stories to music, even though I had vowed, when I first began to know about opera, never to set classical mythology, simply because that’s what everyone else seemed to have done.

The first operas, performed in Italy in the 17th century, were mostly based on classical myths – Dafne, Euridice, Orfeo, Poppea; the first opera I ever saw was Cavalli’s La Calisto. As I grew up I realised how many 20th and 21st composers have drawn from Greek myth for their stage works – Stravinsky (Agon, Apollo), Harrison Birtwistle (The Minotaur), Thea Musgrave (Clytemnestra), Mark Antony Turnage (Greek) – so I decided that in my operas I wanted to tell stories from our own time. Which is what I have done up to now. Yet my 20th opera, Dido’s Ghost, returns me to those classics of my childhood, and I now understand why composers were so attracted to Greek and Roman mythology.

Dido’s Ghost combines my love of myth with my love for Henry Purcell and his opera Dido and Aeneas. I had composed a work for Dunedin Consort – Comfort Me with Apples, a setting of The Song of Solomon which featured Matthew Brook (singing the part of Aeneas in Dido’s Ghost). After that premiere it was suggested that I might like to think of a companion piece to Dido and Aeneas. I was immediately excited and asked my friend Wesley Stace (novelist, singer-songwriter, polymath) to be the librettist. Eventually we found exactly the right director for such a project: Frederic Wake-Walker. 

Over the intervening 10 years, we tried to interest various venues and institutions but it wasn’t until December 2019 that Paul Keene, then Classical Music Programmer at the Barbican, hearing about it for the first time, jumped at the idea. The opera was scheduled to receive its premiere on June 6th 2021 so we didn’t have much time but, in a sense, we’d had all those intervening years during which Dido and Aeneas had been percolating. Several other co-commissioners – Mahogany Opera, Buxton International Festival, Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra and Chorale (based in San Francisco) and Edinburgh International Festival where Dido’s Ghost receives it Scottish premiere on August 20th – then gathered around us.

In the initial discussions, Wesley remarked that he had come across a sequel to the story of Dido, in Ovid’s Fasti, which begins when her sister washes up on Aeneas’ shore after he has landed in Italy. This became the scaffold for our opera. John Butt liked the idea of weaving Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas into the new opera so that the older opera would work as a masque performed within the new scenario, therefore also operating as an uncanny flashback. As the work developed, the two began to flow in and out of each other more seamlessly.

Then the pandemic befell the world. 

I was living at my lighthouse in the very north of Scotland with only the sea and my piano for company. Most of Dido’s Ghost was composed there. Looking out at and listening to the waves every day, I thought about my characters, not to mention the many technicalities I had to deal with. 

The sea was therefore my muse for this opera – together with the memory of my first childhood encounter with the story of Dido and Aeneas in Saddlebags’ Latin class. 

Some back-stage interviews with some of the artists involved:

Plus, notes from Wallen's creative collaborators:

John Butt, Conductor and Artistic Director of the Dunedin Consort
The idea of an opera to complement Dido and Aeneus was an evident ambition in Dunedin Consort, even when I first joined the group in 2003-4. Of the two founding artistic directors, Ben Parry, as a conductor of new music and a composer in his own right, had pushed for many new commissions, and it was Susan Hamilton who developed the specific ambition of commissioning a companion piece for Dido. Although time and finances never seemed to be on our side, I introduced my old friend Errollyn to the group a few years later and she provided us with an exquisite chamber piece based around the Song of Songs. When we mentioned our Dido ambition she leapt at it immediately – she had been obsessed with Dido’s lament for years – and it was she who then went to Wesley Stace. None of us had heard of Ovid’s addition to the story, which Wesley knew so well, and it was clear that this was something of a gift for any production involving Purcell’s original. It rapidly became obvious that Purcell’s opera could function as a court drama within the new opera, rather than as a separate piece, and that it could also function as a flashback (Wesley thinks that this amalgamation was his idea – I think it might have been partly mine – but either way, it’s a brilliant idea!). Wesley’s language and themes interact superbly with the original text and help define the characters with a sense of their own past.

It was over 10 years before we finally had the opportunity to go ahead with this project, and it was very gratifying to gain so many other distinguished commissioners along the way, something that seemed to confirm the attractiveness of the overall idea. To me, we hear the characters expressing their past in Purcell’s language, while existing in their present via Errollyn’s. Interestingly, both musical languages are equally composites of their age (in Purcell’s case referring to French court drama, Italian song, English polyphony, ‘high’ and ‘low’ popular cultures). Errollyn’s language, as a remarkable synthesis of contemporary musical styles, which also articulates a viewpoint (particularly through the eerie recurrences throughout the opera), not only represents the present of the older Aeneus, Anna and Lavinia, but also our own. We can hear the Purcell as part of our past but also something still familiar in our present. In this way we are wonderfully, uncannily, wound into a sense of our broad cultural roots and history, reminded that the past lives on in many ways, and – if we dismiss it too readily – likely to repeat itself in disturbing ways.

Wesley Stace, librettist
Errollyn approached me with the idea of collaborating on an opera that either contained or involved Dido and Aeneas, Purcell’s short masterpiece often paired with another opera to make an evening-long entertainment.

In fact, and by complete coincidence, I’d been researching a novel of which the central theme was the development of the Dido myth through the ages. Most people know the story in Virgil’s Aeneid, or indeed Purcell, but the key discovery for me was in Ovid’s Fasti: quite a dry work taking the form of a calendar with a deity’s story for every day of the year, in which the Ides of March, the 15th, is celebrated as the day of Anna Parenna, Dido’s sister (called Belinda in Purcell’s opera).

Anna’s story is economically told by Ovid in just 50 or so lines: shipwrecked, having fled after Dido’s death, she is washed up on Aeneas’ shore where he finds her (like the girl from Doctor No, was my initial thought) and takes her back to the palace. His wife Lavinia becomes jealous and plots to kill her. Dido’s ghost appears, warning Anna to flee. She is saved and becomes immortal.

My novel was never written, except in as much as it became this opera 10 years later, and Ovid’s mini-sequel became the basis for Dido’s Ghost. My original suggestion ­– and indeed it may have been John Butt’s! Errollyn might remember better than I – was that we could take Ovid’s Anna narrative and insert a court performance of Purcell’s opera in the middle: our starting point. As these ideas developed, and as the psychological implications of this reckoning between the past and the present became more explicit, Freddie, the director, suggested we entwine the Purcell opera more subtly and interlace the two so that the new story, the psychology and the new score bleed seamlessly in and out of the Purcell: a musically entwined version of Purcell’s original within a new Wallen. Meanwhile, the story of Dido’s Ghost was developing around the Purcell.

Stylistically, I found I was increasingly choosing language consonant with the Tate libretto: a very beautiful text. All art requires a little suspension of disbelief, but I didn’t want anything linguistically jarring. I did this with rhyme ­– not end-rhyme, as I might do in writing a song – but rather internal rhymes and assonance. I didn’t want it to sound too martial, as translations of Greek and Roman texts can, and of course I also had to make it singable, but that was fun because I love Errollyn’s music so I could imagine what she needed; also I do that with lyrics anyway.

Everybody thinks of it as Anna’s story, and of course primarily it is, and also Dido’s story: the title is Dido’s Ghost (and I'd always imagined the tagline would be ‘REMEMBER HER!’, like a modern horror movie). But in a practical sense, the story also concludes the Aeneid. When Aeneas fulfilled his Italian destiny, the ‘modern’ world continued without Gods, leaving him to pine for a distant mythical past. With the materialization of Anna, the Gods and the ghosts return too, forcing a retribution with many emotional and political implications. Aeneas – a little like Tennyson’s Ulysses ­– is given one more chance, knowing his divine mission will only be complete after Dido’s original curse on the Trojan race is lifted.

Writing the libretto was a beautiful way to consider Dido one more time, because the Dido story flows like a river through time, and this was our chance to swim in it for a little while: to bring her back, even her ghost after its manifestation in Hades.

Find full details of this weekend's performances of Dido's Ghost at the Edinburgh International Festival website