by Henry Purcell
seen 14 March 2015
Purcell's music, created to adapt a play by Sir Henry Howard and John Dryden into a semi-opera, was left unfinished at the composer's death in 1695. The production at English National Opera by Peter Sellars is a co-production between ENO, Perm State Opera (Russia) and Teatro Real in Madrid. It uses the fifty minutes Purcell had composed, together with excerpts from other works and settings of religious music by him, and also spoken text from Rosario Aguilar's novel 'The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma'. The original plot of the play has been completely abandoned (it concerns a totally fictional struggle between 'Peru' and 'Mexico' set before the European arrival in the Americas) in favour of an extended rumination on the Spanish conquest of the Mayan peoples.
