English Touring Opera: Ariadne / Dido & Aeneas

ARIADNE

You left for dead. I love you

Ariadne wakes on the shore and finds Theseus gone. She helped him escape Crete, leaving her home, her family, and the life she once knew behind. Now she has been abandoned.

King Minos' daughter writes to the lover who has abandoned in a poignant one-act drama which explores how absence is defined by love. A powerful and intimate retelling of the myth of Ariadne, Elena Langer sets Glyn Maxwell’s Poem Ariadne to Theseus for the first half of ETO’s Autumn Double Bill.

DIDO & AENEAS

Queen Dido of Carthage prepares to wed the Trojan hero, Aeneas. But the rejected King Iarbas has planned his revenge with a devastating intervention that threatens to drive the lovers apart.

Based on Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas recalls the tragedy of the Queen of Carthage in a masterpiece of Baroque music, theatricality and despair.