Lament of Aeneas for alto flute and orchestra (2004).
Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has become something of a staple for students of musicology. The popularity of this aria is partially due to its clarity of purpose, which is to express the emotional distress of Dido as she laments the inevitability of her death (“When I am laid in earth...”), and partially to its formal structure, which consists of Dido’s sobbing melody-line over a repeated descending chromatic tetrachord, or ground bass.
The Lament of Aeneas allows Dido’s counterpart to express his remorse for allowing her to suffer such a cruel fate, (Aeneas is not given this opportunity in Purcell’s opera). As in the Purcell, this lament is structured upon a repeated progression, (or ground), though this material is much longer than the 5 bar phrases of Dido’s aria and is only restated twice. The piece also features “climbing” transitions that interrupt and then lead back to the thematic repetitions, which gives the ground the character of a refrain.
Another difference between the two pieces is that The Lament of Aeneas has no text. This relationship is reflective of Purcell’s opera since, within that work, Aeneas stands as the least developed of the main characters. In essence, this lament has preserved the mystery inherent to the character of Aeneas by embodying his character in the haunting tones of the alto flute, and by limiting his ability to express himself, (by virtue of that instrument’s inability to reproduce text), to raw gestures of emotion.
