The University of Delaware’s Opera Theatre and Collegium Musicum are adding early opera to their repertoires with the upcoming production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The English opera Dido and Aeneas tells of the love between Dido, the queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas. The opera’s librettist, Nahum Tate, based his narration of the tale on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid. In the opera, Dido’s passion soon turns to heartbreak and despair at Aeneas’ unexpected decision to leave in order to fulfill (what he believes to be) the command of the gods.

Performances are at 8 p.m., Friday, Feb. 24, and at 3 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 26, in the Loudis Recital Hall of the Amy E. du Pont Music Building on UD’s Newark campus. There will be a short pre-opera talk given by music history professor Maria Purciello an hour prior to Friday evening’s performance.

Tickets to all performances are $15 for adults; $10 for UD faculty, staff and alumni and senior adults; and $5 for students. Advanced ticket sales are available through the REP Box Office, telephone 302-831-2204.

Dido and Aeneas marks a new direction for the music students at UD, many of whom regularly perform late 18th- through 21st-century works, but have fewer opportunities to work with earlier repertoire.

As Russell Murray, director of Collegium Musicum notes, “Typically, early music exists on its own, a ‘specialty’ pursued by a limited number of students. By combining the Opera Theatre and the Collegium Musicum we bring this music into the mainstream and expose more students to these styles of performance.” Such exposure is key, he continues, as it “lets the students think in new and creative ways, moving out of their comfort zone. It is, to an extent, like learning a new language.”

While the language is new, the subject matter is somewhat familiar to student performers who study excerpts from the final scenes of the opera in their music history courses. Purciello notes that “the opportunity to bring history to life in a fully staged performance truly drives home the relevance of historical study in a performance-based discipline. Even more importantly, a performance such as Dido and Aeneas challenges student performers to think carefully about the interconnection between historical performance and modern-day practice, and to make thoughtful, yet creative performance decisions that reflect their knowledge of the past and their understanding of modern-day audiences.”

Creativity is essential in Dido and Aeneas, as vocalists are challenged to explore new vocal techniques and the expectation that they can and will lyrically improvise. When asked about these challenges, the director of Opera Theatre, Blake Smith, explains how “the biggest vocal adjustment is the pitch difference, using A415 instead of the [more modern] traditional A440 tuning.”

Moreover, “early operas pose a challenge dramatically because composers operated with much greater economy of text. An aria with six lines of text may last four minutes with multiple repetitions, and this is not typically the case in more recent repertoire; it challenges the singer to find new ways to articulate the same text and to match physical movement with the slower delivery.”

Similarly, instrumentalists performing on period instruments must not only partly improvise their accompaniments, but do so on period instruments that, while they may look like modern-day instruments, are played quite differently.

Despite the performance challenges, Dido and Aeneas is a very approachable work for performers and audience members alike. As Murray observes, “The mix of choruses, recitative and simple airs (and the fact that it is in English) make it a perfect entry point to a wide and rich repertoire.” Indeed, with its connections to classical literature and political allegory, its tale of passionate love that tragically ends in despair, its moving airs and choruses, and just a dash of sorcery, Dido and Aeneas promises to have something for everyone.