Andreas N. Tarkmann: |Dido’s Secret

Three hundred years ago, Henry Purcell composed his opera “Dido and Aeneas”: he wrote this well-known work in 1689 for a girls’ boarding school, where it was also performed. Inspired by this historical context, the contemporary composer Andreas N. Tarkmann and the librettist Eberhard Streul have created their own opera “Dido’s Secret”, a work commissioned by the Mädchenchor Hannover. Their storyline is modelled closely on Purcell’s opera, which combines magnificent music with a highly dramatic and effective plot, in the course of which the witches’ hatred destroys the love between Queen Dido and Prince Aeneas. Tarkmann and Streul transfer Purcell’s work into the present and into the context of an elitist musical institution through a few dramaturgical changes. The parallels with the original “Dido and Aeneas” are multifaceted: while the choir girls in “Dido’s Secret” busy themselves with the rehearsals for the Purcell opera because they hope to win a competition, the young main protagonists, as if determined by fate, act in the very same unfortunate constellations as the opera they rehearse. Thus, Streul’s libretto mirrors the dramatic threads of the Baroque original and recasts them in the story of “Dido’s Secret” – a grave plot without happy end which gives centre stage to topics such as communal spirit, peer pressure, and mobbing.