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Dido
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In Greek mythology, Dido ("manly woman"... named Elissa) was the founder and first Queen of Carthage. Her father was Belus. After Aeneas fled Troy, he stopped in Carthage and Dido fell in love with him. When he left to go found Rome, she killed herself. When Aeneas went to Hades, he talked to her ghost and she refused to forgive him. Also as a ghost, Dido told her sister, Anna Perenna, that Aeneas' wife, Lavinia, was a jealous person.
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Dido & Aeneas is the story of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who falls in love with Aeneas, who flees to Carthage after his defeat in the Trojan War. A sorceress and her coven of witches plot Dido’s downfall. They send a false messenger telling Aeneas he must leave Carthage for Rome immediately. Aeneas reluctantly obeys; abandoned and brokenhearted, Dido kills herself.
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While Dido has an established fan base in her native England, it took Eminem to really increase her profile in the United States. Slim Shady sampled Dido's "Thank You" for his dark song, "Stan," which has been hailed as one of the best tracks off his multi-platinum album. The funny thing is that Dido was trained to be a classical musician that was more likely to perform alongside Pavarotti than Eminem.
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While there are many fine recordings of Dido in the catalogue, none has incorporated both the view of the Sorceress as Dido's “Shadow” and offered a historically informed interpretation of a Restoration Witch. By 1685, witches were regarded as caricatures of malevolence - quite different to Macbeth's witches. After years of performing laments and mad songs, we are convinced of the need for the singer to characterize through the voice all the emotions this repertoire depicts, even when some of these are not very “nice” and call for a complimentary distortion of tone - something that most classical singers would reject as unbecoming. Evelyn has no such inhibitions; she is an artist always ready to go to the edge in the search for dramatic and emotional truth, and puts this into practice for both Dido and her shadowy partner in fate.
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Electronic pop chanteuse Dido entered London's Guildhall School of Music at age six, and by the time she reached her teens had already mastered piano, violin and recorder. After touring with a British classical ensemble, she accepted a publishing job, in the meanwhile singing in a series of local groups before joining the trip-hop outfit Faithless -- helmed by her older brother, the noted DJ and producer Rollo -- in 1995. As the group's 1996 debut Reverence went on to sell some five million copies worldwide, Dido began working on solo material, developing a lushly ethereal sound combining elements of acoustic pop and electronica; signing with Arista, she released her debut LP No Angel in mid-1999, and toured with the Lilith Fair that summer. Her biggest break... came the following year, when rap superstar Eminem sampled the No Angel track "Thank You" for the chorus of his hit single "Stan," to surprisingly touching effect. Demand for the Dido original escalated quickly, and "Thank You" became a Top Five smash in early 2001, as did the album, which topped sales of 12 million copes worldwide by the time Dido returned to the spotlight two years later. In September 2003, Dido released her long-awaited follow up entitled Life For Rent.
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This marked difference in the character of Dido between Virgil and Purcell may lie in the purpose of the work. With the Aeneid, Virgil wrote this work to exalt the Roman Empire through the magnificent history of Aeneas. To glorify the empire, Virgil depicts Aeneas as "pious Aeneas" who does no wrong. Thus, Dido is the villain discouraging Aeneas from founding a new land in Italy, which would become the Roman Empire. But, with Purcell, his opera was originally made as a performance in a girls' boarding school. Because the audience was all girls, Purcell may have portrayed Dido in a more positive light for the girls to respect:
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Dido