Dido & Aeneas

The BBC has always had a problem with televised opera: it costs a lot to put on and it often receives a zero audience rating. This 1995 film is probably a response to this problem. It is a glossy film populated by beautiful people, miming to Purcell's opera. It is very difficult to work out what is going on, partly because the film concentrates on looking beautiful rather than illustrating the narrative. The words are largely unintelligible, possibly because of the aforementioned miming. In fact, I was only able to follow the plot because I recently saw Berlioz's Les Troyens, which covers similar territory.

Apart from the reservation about intelligibility, the opera is well sung, particularly by the two leads, Maria Ewing and Karl Daymond. James Bowman sings the role of Mercury but, perhaps wisely, gets someone else to sit in a tree and mime his part. Maria Ewing is perhaps the worst lip-syncher that I have ever seen. This is not a criticism: it is not part of an opera singer's job description to be able to lip-sync. At the end, she sings "When I am laid in earth… remember me" but the rest of the cast do not remember because, in the next scene, we see them cremating her. Perhaps a cremation makes better television than a burial.