Charles G. Salas’s “American Carthage” (p. 27) explores the many ways in which the name Carthage has resonated through history. Central to his narrative are the exploits of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who battled the Romans during the Second Punic War. Hannibal has always beguiled the student of military history, but another figure associated with Carthage—no less a personage than Dido, the city’s legendary founder—has held greater appeal for the artist. Ovid, Marlowe, and Shakespeare all wrote of Dido’s ill-fated love affair with the Trojan hero Aeneas, though no account is more heartbreaking than Book IV of Vergil’s Aeneid. On his way from the ruins of Troy to become the progenitor of Rome, Aeneas lingers in Carthage, having fallen in love with its queen. Eventually, Aeneas is reminded of his destiny and ends up abandoning his lover. A distraught Dido then delivers a bitter soliloquy before impaling herself on Aeneas’s sword.
Decorum prevented the English composer Henry Purcell (c. 1659–1695) from depicting so blood-soaked a scene in his operatic masterpiece, Dido and Aeneas. By necessity, Dido’s closing aria is more of an inward utterance, distant in temperament from the call for vengeance found in The Aeneid. And yet, it is no less intense. After a somber recitative and a bass line that descends in uneasy half steps, Dido sings her lament, which consists of only three lines: “When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create / No trouble in thy breast; / Remember me! but ah! forget my fate.” Librettist Nahum Tate’s text is ordinary at best (the word create, for example, is awkward—forced into the lyric, it would seem, to rhyme with fate). Purcell’s genius lay in his ability to transform those words into something otherworldly, repeating the lines to superb effect, each repetition conveying an increased sense of desperation. The dotted rhythm on the phrase “Remember me!” is particularly haunting—an urgent, plangent plea—and when Dido sings these words for the last time, the dramatic rise in pitch hits with shattering beauty and surprise. The aria ends with a slow, downward, chromatic progression to a G minor chord: a drifting away that feels inevitable, like the final descent into eternal sleep.
