About the work
Opera (dramma per musica) in a prologue and three acts by Francesco Cavalli to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, based on Virgil’s "Aeneid". It premiered during the 1640/41 carnival season at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice.
Plot
After the fall of Troy, Aeneas and the fleeing Trojans land in Carthage, where Queen Dido, under Cupid’s influence, falls in love with him. Mercury orders Aeneas to sail on to Italy; the despairing Dido fails in an attempt to take her own life and eventually marries King Iarbas, who had earlier saved her from suicide.
Cultural significance
Unlike Virgil’s account, the opera ends with Dido’s rescue and marriage rather than her death, and Busenello treats the material with a characteristically unconventional, at times comic touch, making the king a figure of ridicule. Performed on several Italian stages after its premiere, the opera then fell into obscurity for centuries and received its first known modern revival only in 1952, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, directed by Gustaf Gründgens.